Manage multiple accounts more easily with manager accounts

If you’re managing multiple accounts in Microsoft Advertising, whether as part of your own business or as an agency helping your clients with their business, we understand that you have unique needs. From how you set up and organize your accounts, to how you efficiently and effectively stay on top of maintaining them, our mission is to make this easy for you, so that you’re empowered to meet your marketing goals.
 
Over the past few years, your feedback has led to us not only delivering experiences and capabilities that are familiar to you from other advertising platforms, but also to differentiated capabilities that you clearly have a need for. Thank you for being on this journey with us! Your feedback continues to shape our product.  
 
We’re thrilled to introduce three key updates to you, in this next phase of multi-account management experiences: manager accounts, hierarchies and manager account shared libraries.

Manager account? That sounds familiar…

Starting now, references to Customer (also referred to as the Customer Shell or CID) in Microsoft Advertising will begin changing to manager account, which is the terminology you told us you’re familiar with. However, we at Microsoft Advertising are offering you a differentiated experience where everyone has a manager account from the moment they sign up, instead of the two different experiences for single account and multi-account managers that you get on other advertising platforms. This makes your experience more seamless, while still providing complete control over when and how you start leveraging more multi-account capabilities. Whether you’re a seasoned multi-account manager or just getting started, you’ll automatically see your manager account (customer) and account set up.


Manager account is the container for one or multiple accounts, providing a centralized place to help you access and manage multiple accounts. Accounts are the basic entity that hold all your campaigns that directly serve your ads.

What about hierarchies?

Along with this manager account/account rebranding, we’re also excited to announce that hierarchies is now available for all Microsoft Advertising users worldwide.
 
Hierarchies allow you to build linking relationships between your accounts and between manager accounts, to match how your business is organized. This unlocks powerful capabilities across your account structures, but we’ll come to that in a bit. First, let’s take a deeper look at the capabilities of your hierarchy:

• Build up to five layers into your multi-account structure. Whether you have subsidiaries, are managing different brand or product lines, need to pay for advertising in multiple currencies, are an agency managing client accounts or a client working with agencies, hierarchies can match the setup of your business.
• Link and unlink accounts and manager accounts. You can easily make connections to the accounts and manager accounts that you want.

Additionally, Microsoft Advertising offers you a couple of differentiated experiences. You can have up to five direct managers for a manager account, instead of just the one direct manager allowed on other advertising platforms. When granting access to non-Super Admin users, you still have granular control, and can choose to give access to specific accounts in the hierarchy.


The Owner is the manager account that originally created the account, while the Direct manager is the manager account that linked to the account or manager account.
 

With hierarchies, you now have a unified All accounts selector that replaces the separate account selectors you previously had on different pages. Your accounts are now linked in the dropdown menu.

4 ways to organize and manage your account(s) 

With hierarchies available, there are now four different ways you can access and manage your account. These aren’t mutually exclusive and won’t conflict with each other:

1. Multi-user access. We released this back in February 2018, and later included the ability to manage from our mobile app. You may already have multi-user access if you manage multiple manager accounts today. This allows you to use the same credentials across any manager accounts you have access to, with various types of user roles available as needed.
2. Multi-linking. Multi-linking allows you to link accounts that are under other manager accounts in bulk, as well as an option to take over billing responsibility at any time. For more information on both multi-linking and multi-user access, you can read this training resource.
3. Hierarchies (new). Hierarchies are described above, where you can have a manager account linked to another manager account, and up to five direct managers linked to a manager account. The two types of direct manager relationships are: Administrative, which allows users on the upper-level manager account to manage users and other requests, and Standard, which doesn’t allow for those permissions and only supports campaign management and resource sharing.
4. Mix. Previously, you may have used multi-linking and multi-user access to link accounts and gain visibility into separate and distinct accounts that are organized under different manager accounts. But if, for example, an agency inherited a Microsoft Advertising account, there was no way to consolidate two separate manager accounts into one parent manager account — until now, with hierarchies.

The Direct managers tab, showing multiple managers on one account.
 
While there are clear benefits to working hierarchies into your account structure, there are also some things to consider before merging separate accounts into one hierarchy. For more, see Choosing between a hierarchy or multi-user access.

Unlocking the power of manager account shared libraries

As mentioned above, hierarchies unlock powerful capabilities across your account structure. One key capability is manager account shared libraries, which allow you to share resources across multiple accounts.  We’re starting with the resource sharing you asked for the most, and are excited to announce sharing UET tags and Remarketing lists across your hierarchy is now available for all Microsoft Advertising users worldwide. Based on your feedback, we’re offering you a differentiated experience, where resource sharing across any part of the hierarchy is one seamless experience, and you have granular control over which specific accounts you would like to share with. 


In the Shared Library, you now have an option to share a resource with all accounts owned by you, or with selected manager accounts and accounts.

What other benefits or differentiators are available for managing multiple accounts?

Below is a refresher on all that you can do with multi-account management in Microsoft Advertising. Our capabilities continue to be geared towards empowering you to be more efficient so that you don’t need to spend time on management tasks and can focus on your marketing goals. At the same time, we aim to provide you with the transparency and control that enables you to maintain your accounts the way you want to.

• Centralized billing management. Microsoft Advertising offers flexible experiences for managing your payment methods and billing across all your accounts in one place. Your entire collection of payment methods can be at the manager account level, and once you add a payment method the first time, you can apply it to any account underneath you with ease, including through bulk actions for credit/debit cards and PayPal. You can see all your bills in one place, to stay on top of payments and any outstanding balances. If you run into any payment issues, we offer a simple experience to fix issues across all your impacted accounts.
• Simple billing takeover. Microsoft Advertising enables you to take over billing for any account under your hierarchy, for now or scheduled for later.
• Consolidated invoices. If you’re managing accounts on a credit line, you can consolidate your invoices for multiple accounts into a single invoice.
• Insertion order efficiency. If you’re managing accounts on a credit line, Microsoft Advertising makes it possible for you to manage your insertion orders (IOs) across all your accounts. You can import or export worksheets to manage your insertion order changes in minutes, can take actions in bulk, and even set your insertion orders to run on a recurring basis.
• User access flexibility. Microsoft Advertising provides you with more flexibility and control over how you grant access to non-Super Admin users, even with hierarchies. As explained above, you can grant non-Super admins access to either all accounts or certain accounts.
• Notifications all in one place. Based on your account structure, you can get all your notifications for the accounts in one place, so you can stay on top of things more easily. Super Admins can manage email notification preferences for other users, in bulk across their accounts.

We’re thrilled to continue delivering these exciting capabilities for you, empowering you to achieve more when managing multiple accounts with us.

Thank you for continuing this journey with us!

Please keep the feedback coming

We’re grateful for your feedback. It shapes our product, so please keep it coming! For any questions or feedback regarding hierarchies and manager accounts, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager or contact support. You can also ping us on Twitter, suggest a feature on the Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions Forum, or send an email to advertising-feedback@microsoft.com.