Advertising

Skip to main content
Advertising

Experience new growth possibilities with Microsoft Advertising today >

Microsoft Advertising Blog
Page 1 of results

How Your Feedback is Shaping Bing Ads – July 2014 Edition

A key focus area for the engineering team is ensuring that we are consistently improving on features that reflect the most important areas of feedback from our customers. For this reason, we obsessively review our User Voice feature suggestion forum to get a sense of the top areas where you, our customer, would like us to improve the product, and make managing your paid search campaigns a more productive and enjoyable experience.  

Over the past few months we’ve worked hard to complete a number of issues; specifically those which were highly voted on in our User Voice forum. Today, I’d like to start the first of our quarterly recaps by highlighting the changes we’ve made in six areas based solely on your feedback. These areas are:

  1. Improved reporting
  2. Elimination of normalization errors
  3. Accounts managed by multiple users
  4. Improved diagnostics on why campaigns are not performing
  5. Usability improvements in the web UI 
  6. Simplifying Campaign Analytics

If there are areas you’re interested in that are not in the above, you can view the list of User Voice items that we’re currently on, vote on items we haven’t started working on or suggest new features

Improved Reporting

Ease of access to information about campaign performance – it’s the lifeblood of search engine marketing. To give you all the information you need at your fingertips, we’ve made changes to provide better access to conversion metrics and the introduction of the search terms report on the Campaigns page in both the Keywords and Dimensions tabs.

Elimination of Keyword Normalization Errors

Once upon a time, Bing Ads did not allow the ability to submit variants of a keyword with extraneous characters—for example, “bike shed” and “bike-shed.” This resulted in requests for tools to create workflows that determined how keywords would be normalized before uploading them to Bing Ads. We are excited to share there is no longer a need for such tools, as we now allow keywords with extraneous characters, including those that differ by an accent mark, such as “café” and “cafe.”

Accounts Managed by Multiple Users

Many of our advertisers are managed by agencies which presents the need to have multiple people managing an account, often with different abilities to view or make changes. Based on your feedback, we revamped this experience earlier this year to address the top pain points around multiple users accessing an account.

Improved Diagnostics on Why Campaigns are not Performing

Trying to figure out why your ads are not getting enough impressions and/or clicks can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, especially if you don’t have ample tools to tell you where to look. We recently added some new delivery statuses related to low search volumes and low bids to make it easier to identify why campaigns in those situations aren’t getting clicks, and to save you time.

Usability Improvements in the Web UI

Sometimes seemingly simple changes can have a profound effect on usability. Our recent change to add totals at the top and bottom of the Campaigns page is one such example. No more scrolling back and forth just to be reminded of the total while reviewing your keywords, ads or other entities. J

Simplifying Campaign Analytics

Last but not least, we’d heard loud and clear that making it easier to track where clicks are coming from in Google Analytics was an important feature for a large number of you. You asked, so we delivered—auto-tagging of destination URLs is now available in Bing Ads.

We’d like to thank you for being Bing Ads customers and for providing us great suggestions on how to improve our product. We welcome seeing more of your suggestions in our User Voice feature suggestion forum and look forward to sharing another round of product improvements based on your feedback in our next update.

Comments? Questions? Feel free to leave them below or ping me on Twitter.

Dare Obasanjo

Group Program Manager, Bing Ads Applications and Developer Platform