Professional Service Ads and other product updates for April

Happy springtime in the Northern Hemisphere, and welcome to another edition of the Microsoft Advertising monthly product roundup. In the last month, we’ve shared a lot of exciting announcements, including annual Partner Awards for Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific, a new category-based targeting solution for retail media, and how to do more with less in 2023.

Now it’s time to recap a few product rollouts from this past month:

This month’s top story: Professional Service Ads now available globally

Microsoft Advertising’s suite of vertical ads have continued to progress: Just a couple weeks ago, we announced our beta for Doctor and Clinic Ads, and today we’re excited to share that Professional Service Ads are now available globally!

Professional Service Ads help consumers connect directly to professionals in a variety of industries such as insurance, real estate, doctor & clinics, tax services and home services. If you’re in an industry that’s powered by great people like agents, advisors, or consultants, give Professional Service Ads a try today!

Upgrading to Enhanced CPC on the Microsoft Audience Network

Last week, you may have also seen a standalone post on a change we’re making to bidding on the Microsoft Audience Network. There’s no action required from you to prepare for this change; however, there are some areas that you can optimize to ensure you’re set up for success. For all those details and more, see our blog post.

Changes to broad match modifier

There are also changes we’ve recently notified advertisers of regarding broad match modifier, which was deprecated in 2021. As of now and rolling out gradually over the next several weeks, all broad match modifier keywords for search ads now serve as broad match keywords instead of phrase match.

No action is required from you on this, as we expect this change to be beneficial to advertisers’ conversions and cost per acquisition (CPA) overall. There won’t be any impacts to bidding strategies or third-party bidding. For more information on match types, see What are keyword match types, and how do I use them?

Bulk operations in Asset Library

We know that visual assets are essential for advertisers, and that’s why we keep making improvements to our Asset Library page to help you provide the most resonant imagery. With this latest update, you can now organize your assets with bulk operations, allowing you to easily bulk delete folders and assets, and move multiple items in bulk to your target folder or subfolder. This is designed to simplify your workflow, saving you time and effort in managing your Asset Library.

Target bid value: New column for easier optimization

Automated bidding is also a critically important facet of the platform that we continually work to improve to help your ease of management. Now, we’ve rolled out the ability to view and edit the current target bid value within the campaign grid in Microsoft Advertising online. This is available when Target CPA, Target return on ad spend (ROAS), or Target Impression Share bid strategies are in place.

This applies for both standalone bid strategies and also for portfolio bidding, and you can add this column via the “modify column” command in Microsoft Advertising online. For more information on all our bidding strategies, see Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies.

That’s all for April—We’ll see you back here on May 2nd with another recap. Take care, everyone!

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal, in-product feedback, Twitter, or Instagram, and as always, contact Support.