Welcome to another edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup. At Microsoft Advertising, we’re committed to building the Microsoft Advertising platform with clients at the center. It’s not about what we want to build, it’s about what we think will make your jobs easier—and what you’re saying is essential to your success.
For this month’s roundup, we’ll share our product releases that help advertisers drive more results and reach more customers with less effort.
As a reminder, this past month has also seen insightful posts around search trends from generative AI and Insights Navigator, a new sales enablement tool with generative AI at its core. We encourage advertisers to check out those at the links above, and also don’t forget to RSVP for Cannes!
This month’s top story: Maximize conversion value bid strategy is now available for search and shopping search campaigns
For advertisers looking to drive revenue and return on investment (ROI), one bid strategy that can help advertisers is Maximize Conversion Value, which focuses on optimizing high-value conversions and the total sales value of your campaign.
Maximize Conversion Value was previously only available for smart shopping campaigns, but we’re excited to share it is now available for all search and shopping search campaigns as well.
With this bid strategy, we’ll automatically set your bids in real time to maximize total conversion value within your budget. If you have specific ROI goals, you can choose to add a Target ROAS (return on ad spend).
Choose Maximize Conversion Value in the bid strategy section.
If you have a specific conversion goal (as opposed to a specific revenue goal), you can also select Maximize Conversions as your bid strategy to maximize the number of conversions as much as possible given your budget available.
It’s important to remember that these conversion and revenue-based bid strategies require conversion tracking within our platform, via Universal Event Tracking (UET) and/or offline conversions. This is a critical step to helping advertisers set up their Microsoft campaigns for optimal performance.
For more information on Maximize Conversion Value and other available bid strategies, see Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies.
Ensuring advertisers are able to track conversions with Microsoft Click ID
In an evolving identity landscape, it’s important to ensure our advertisers are prepared with the right future-proof capabilities so that we’re building a web that works for everyone.
One way we’re doing that is with Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID), a unique click ID added to landing page URLs that help advertisers effectively track conversions from their site.
Auto-tagging of MSCLKID—enabled by default for new accounts—ensures that no conversion tracking falls through the cracks, in the cases where the Microsoft cookie can’t be returned due to browser settings (e.g., third-party cookie blocking) or browser type. If you don’t have auto-tagging of Microsoft Click ID enabled, these conversions aren’t tracked.
To help ensure all advertisers are set up with MSCLKID, starting this month we’ll be adjusting settings so that MSCLKID is automatically enabled for eligible advertisers that don’t yet have it enabled.
Elevate your brand presence by harnessing AI for intelligent image cropping
Building the Microsoft Advertising platform with advertisers at the center also means connecting the dots on technology advancements to leapfrog you ahead of where you are today and embracing new technologies in smart and helpful ways.
To that end, we’re excited to announce a new way we’re integrating AI into your workflows to help highlight your brand at its best: smart image cropping for Audience ads and image extensions. This intelligently analyzes your images and automatically crops to focus on the most important part of the image, so you don’t have to crop it manually.
In the asset creation workflow, once you’ve uploaded your images, smart image cropping will leverage AI capabilities to help you automatically crop to various aspect ratios, focusing on the most important elements of your ad.
You always retain full control and flexibility, with the ability to manually re-crop to focus on specific elements before you save.
Without smart cropping (left) and with smart cropping (right)—automatically cropped to focus on the most important part of the image.
Easily reach more audiences across the globe with new expansions in languages
Another key focus of Microsoft Advertising to help advertisers achieve business outcomes is expansion of our audiences. We’re excited to announce that we’ve added five more languages to our Microsoft Advertising platform making it even easier for clients to connect with customers in Southeast Asia and India.
The new languages are Thai, Malay, Indonesian, Filipino, and Hindi. This means that you can now reach more audiences and tailor campaigns to local languages. Check out the full list of supported languages here.
Hotel Center subaccounts deprecation on April 8, 2024
Finally, as announced back in January 2024, we’re deprecating the creation of subaccounts and bid management in Hotel Center, and the only way to manage and showcase our lodging solutions (Hotel Price ads and Property Promotion ads) will be through our new enhanced offering, Lodging campaigns.
After April 8, your subaccounts in Hotel Center will no longer run but you’ll still be able to use Hotel Center to manage your feeds, such as uploading and editing your property feed or verifying your transaction messages.
Contact your account team or our ad support team to assist you with the migration process.
Wrap up
That’s all for this month’s roundup blog. We’ll see you back here on May 7 with another recap of what else is to come in Microsoft Advertising. Take care.
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, X, or Instagram, and as always, contact Support.
Stay informed
Sign up for the Microsoft Advertising Insider newsletter to keep up with the latest insights, product news, tips and tricks, thought leadership, customer success stories, and resources.