Welcome to the December edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup! We’ve made it to the end of the calendar year with only a few more weeks of the holiday season to go. In November, we covered off on why Retail Media matters and posted a reminder about Partner Award nominations now being open.
But there’s plenty to get excited about in the product space of Microsoft Advertising, so let’s dive right into the updates for this month.
This month’s top story: Video Ads on the Microsoft Audience Network
Did you hear last month’s news? It’s time to press play! We’re excited to announce that Video Ads on the Microsoft Audience Network are now generally available in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand. These ads complement your existing search and image ad strategy, allowing you to drive deeper connections with a highly relevant audience.
For more information on Video Ads and the performance they drive, check out the blog post, and learn more about setting them up on our help page About Video Ads.
Flyer Extensions now available
In terms of other ad experience that can increase visibility and performance, Flyer Extensions are now available globally! These allow you to showcase your image flyers next to Text Ads. Advertisers are able to create up to five Flyer Extensions per account, and the system will uniformly keep them in the rotation.
The following is an example of how a Text Ad is displayed with Flyer Extension on the search engine results page:
Currently, Flyer Extensions are only available for Text Ads, but we’re working on enabling support for sponsored ads within your Shopping Campaigns. For more information, check out our help page.
New folder capabilities within Asset Library coming this month
With all the creative assets you can use to power your Microsoft Advertising campaigns, the Asset Library is a valuable tool to house everything in one place. And now coming this month, we’ll be adding a new folder functionality to help you better organize your assets. Find more information about the Asset Library here.
Import your Performance Max Campaigns
We’ve blogged in the past about our solutions for helping you bring your Performance Max Campaigns over to Microsoft Advertising. We’re excited to share that as of earlier this month, this functionality is now rolling out to all advertisers over the coming weeks! You’ll know when you’ve been enabled when you see a notification in the top right corner of your screen on Microsoft Advertising online.
Online conversions update—retract and restate
We’ve recently launched a new beta for helping you adjust your online conversions after a conversion is recorded. With this new functionality, you can either update (restate) the revenue value associated or delete (retract) the conversion. This is useful in scenarios like returned or cancelled orders, partial returns or reduced conversion value, or correcting a data error, allowing you for more flexibility and accuracy.
If you’re interested in this beta, contact your Microsoft Advertising account representative or support.
Auto-generated remarketing lists now available
Auto-generated remarketing lists are a fast and easy way to leverage remarketing and boost performance. There are three types of lists available:
| List name |
List description |
Requirements |
| All visitors |
A list of users who visited your website in the past 30 days. |
- Active Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag required
|
| All converters |
A list of users who converted within the past 180 days. |
- Active UET tag required
- Active conversion goals required
|
| Smart remarketing list |
A list of users that are likely to convert, similar to users who have already converted, powered by Microsoft Audience Intelligence. |
- Active UET tag required
- Active conversion goals required
|
Smart remarketing lists have been proven to drive increased performance across the Microsoft Search and Audience Networks. Advertisers who leverage these lists see a 92% increase in click-through rate (CTR) and a 45% reduction in cost-per-acquisition (CPA) when they use these lists on the Microsoft Search Network.
On the Microsoft Audience Network, we see a 67% improvement in CTR and an 11% reduction in CPA.
Ready to test these lists out? These lists can be accessed from the Audiences section of your account. Associate the lists with your choice of existing campaigns or ad groups. We recommend starting with a 20% bid adjustment which can be adjusted as you test and monitor performance to see what works best for you.
Ad schedule now with a calendar view
When creating an ad schedule, sometimes it can be easy to make a mistake that accidentally prevents your ads from serving on the right days and hours. To help make it easier for you to understand when ads will deliver when creating an ad schedule, we’ve implemented a new calendar view in the ad scheduling section of Microsoft Advertising online. This provides a clear overview of all the times when your ads will serve with your default bid (0% bid adjustment), a positive bid adjustment, a negative bid adjustment, and all the times when your campaigns will not deliver.
Expanding coverage of Hotel Price Ads and Property Promotion Ads
We’re now in 145 markets for Hotel Price Ads and in 121 markets for Property Promotion Ads and continuing to grow. With Property Promotion Ads, we’ve also expanded our reach significantly beyond Microsoft Bing Maps and are now showcasing them in Microsoft Bing Images and on the Microsoft Bing search engine results page. With these additional placements, we’ve seen a tremendous growth in high double-digit percentage in terms of impressions and clicks for Property Promotion Ads. If you’re already running Hotel Price Ads, we highly encourage you to jump on Property Promotion Ads for incremental clicks and bookings by signing up for the pilot here.
Auto-apply APIs recently sunsetted
Finally, we’re sunsetting some specialized Auto-apply APIs that are now fully available in our more common Campaign & Bulk APIs. For more information on this, check out this page.
That’s all for December—We’ll see you back here after the new year on January 10 with another recap to begin 2023. Take care, everyone, and have a great holiday!
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