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Editor updates: Recommendations and campaign-level associations

New capabilities in Microsoft Advertising Editor have been released, to achieve the goal of making bulk campaign management even easier, and provide ways to optimize your campaign performance. Recommendations were announced last year and have now launched globally. Additionally, with this update, we’re also bringing in the much-requested campaign-level association functionality.

Recommendations

Finding the time to optimize all your campaigns effectively can be a real challenge. To simplify the process, we’ve harnessed the power of AI to automatically provide recommendations that will improve your bids, keywords, and ads, boosting the overall effectiveness of your campaigns. Our goal is to surface easy to understand insights in Editor, in a simple and actionable way.

We’ve added recommendations below that you can take advantage of in your campaign management experience. You'll notice recommendations surfaced with a helpful light bulb icon, a new notification we’ve introduced for this purpose to highlight actions you could take to make your serving campaigns perform better, such as improving bids or adding new and more effective keywords to your ad groups. In cases where your campaigns are at the risk of not serving, you can look for the familiar warning notification instead. Not having enough budget or ad groups that don't have any ads or keywords are good examples of such situations. Whatever the issue, we’ve got you covered with these recommendations:

Fix campaigns that are limited by budget: This warning type recommendation notifies you about campaigns that are missing out on potential traffic, and to keep your ads running. Applying this recommendation changes the campaign budget to a suggested budget.

Set estimated mainline bids: You’ll see this recommendation if you’re missing out on clicks due to not being surfaced on the top of search results. The recommendation will show the bid you likely need to set for your ad to show among the ads on the mainline of search results.

Add new keywords: Researching keywords and setting the right bids is a time-consuming process. Using this recommendation will help save a lot of time on your end as we surface AI-generated keywords for you to use along with their weekly estimated impact.

Fix ad groups that don't have ads or keywords: In order to ensure your ad groups are serving, this warning brings attention to those ad groups that are empty, so your campaign performance isn't impacted. The warning also comes with automatically suggested ads and keywords that are ready to use.

Product view of recommendations in the Editor window.
Recommendations in the Editor window (in yellow strip).

In cases, where you want to review recommendations in detail, you can view them along with their estimated impact before selecting which recommendations to apply. To make things easier, you can also apply directly from the error pane. Since you’re in Editor, you can always make any changes before you post. If you’ve acted on this already or have other changes in mind, you can dismiss them. Later this year, we’ll also be adding a way to filter these recommendations easily.

Campaign-level associations

With this change, we’re bringing a much-needed impactful capability to Editor: the ability to apply audience targeting at campaign-level. Campaign-level associations can help you apply and manage audience associations at the campaign level, so you no longer need to apply the audience targeting to each of the ad groups and then change each individual bid boost. If you’ve used this functionality in the Microsoft Advertising UI before, all of the same goodness applies in Editor.
 
Get ready to save time and apply your audience targeting more quickly:

1. Click Add Audience Association under Audiences to choose from campaign or ad group level audience.
Product view of the add audience association dropdown in Editor.

2. You can choose between the campaign level or ad group level. To use campaign-level associations, select Campaign.

3. Choose the Remarketing list or In-market audience tab based on which audience you would like to associate your campaign to, as it works with both.
Product view of the Remarketing list and In-market audience tabs.

4. You can adjust the bid and click Ok to save your association.

Below are the association and exclusion rules to keep in mind while doing campaign-level association.

Product view of an exclusion rule displayed in Microsoft Advertising Editor interface.
Example of an exclusion rule displayed in Microsoft Advertising Editor (in yellow strip).

Targeting

  1. For each of your campaigns, you can have targeting associations at either the campaign level or the ad group level, but not both.
  2. If you have targeting associations at the ad group level and then want to target audiences at the campaign level, you’ll be prompted to delete all existing ad group associations so you can add campaign-level targeting associations.
  3. If you have targeting associations at the campaign level, and you try to target audiences at the ad group level, you’ll need to remove the campaign-level associations first before adding audiences to the ad group.

Exclusions

  1. Exclusions are allowed at both the campaign and ad group levels.
  2. You can use exclusions with or without associations.
  3. The same audience can be excluded at both the campaign and ad group levels.

Using targeting and exclusions together

  1. The same audience can’t be targeted and excluded at the same level.
  2. If an audience is targeted at the campaign level, it can't be excluded at the campaign level but can be excluded at the ad group level.
  3. If an audience is excluded at the campaign level, it can be targeted at the ad group level but can’t be targeted at the campaign level.
 
Please share your feedback and don't forget to download the latest Editor for Windows and Mac to take advantage of the latest updates!