New bid strategies for Audience ads and other product updates

Welcome back to another edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup. This past month we had announcements about our Microsoft Audiences in Invest, as well as recapped an exciting first year of Netflix ads, as their exclusive technology and sales partner.

But that’s never the whole picture of all that’s happening in Microsoft Advertising. Let’s dive into a few other key updates for this month:

This month’s top story: New bid strategies for Audience ads

Automated bidding on the Microsoft Advertising Network provides you with flexible offerings to meet your advertising goals. We’re excited to share that we’ve now added Maximize Conversions and Target Cost per Acquisition (CPA) as a new bidding strategy for all markets where Microsoft Audience Network is available.

This bidding strategy seeks to maximize your conversions as much as possible based on your budget, as well as the additional optional guardrails of a maximum Cost per Click (CPC) and a Target CPA. In our automated bidding, you maintain control and all decisions, while optimizations help you achieve your advertising goals and performance targets.

Campaigns with less than 30 conversions per month are likely to see higher volatility, and these bids are exclusively managed on Microsoft Advertising (i.e., not compatible with third-party or in-house bidding).

We’ve made plenty of automated bidding enhancements to our entire Microsoft Advertising platform as well, including significant improvements to conversion prediction model accuracy and to initial performance while the bidding strategies are still learning. For more information on auto bidding, visit our help site and learn more about how to Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies.

Test your UET functionality for conversion goals and audience targeting

Of course, no conversion-based bidding strategy would be complete without your UET (Universal Event Tracking) being set up correctly. This is why we now have new UET testing functionality to help add more context and give more control over troubleshooting your UET tags.

When you enter your URL to review your UET events status, you’ll see options such as Tag not found, No traffic received, Time out, or Receiving traffic to help you monitor UET tag data and test issues that may arise in real time. Check it out today to ensure you’re ready for the holiday season.

A reminder on Microsoft Advertising’s Performance Max open beta

Lastly, we don’t want advertisers to forget that Microsoft Advertising’s Performance Max is still in open beta and available to start testing for your campaigns.

If you’re interested in upleveling your marketing with predictive solutions and automated workflows, try out Performance Max with some budget as a complement to your existing search and shopping campaigns this holiday season.

That’s all for now. We’ll see you back here on December 5 with our last recap of 2023.

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.