Audience Ads expansion and other key October product updates

Fall is officially here in the Northern Hemisphere, and Microsoft Advertising product rollouts have kicked into high gear! Since we last checked in with product updates, we’ve released key features such as Optimization Score, Credit card ads, and new Marketing with Purpose Business Attributes to showcase your brand values.

On top of all that, the Microsoft Audience Network has had plenty of exciting news, including video ads and expansion into 18 new markets. Let’s dive into all those updates and what else is new for October. This month’s top story:

Reach new audiences globally with the Microsoft Audience Network

We’re excited to announce that the Microsoft Audience Network is expanding to 18 new markets so you can meaningfully engage with your ideal customers across more of your targeted geos. With this expansion, you can continue to drive highly personalized engagements that perform — now with an expanded footprint globally.

The Microsoft Audience Network connects you to millions of people across work and life via high-quality, brand-safe native ad placements in a diverse portfolio of offerings including MSN, Microsoft Edge, Outlook, and select partners. Microsoft Audience Ads are currently available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, France, and Germany. We’re proud to extend this reach to new markets, including: Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Venezuela.

Note: some advertisers who have been extending search campaigns to native in existing markets may already see the ability to deliver Audience Ads in the expanded markets. Advertisers in new markets who have not yet leveraged Audience Ads will be able to extend search to native in new markets in the next few months. Standalone campaigns in new markets will be available soon as well.

Learn more about extending search campaigns to native, updating location targets, and Microsoft Advertising Policies.

Measure the full value of your ads on the Microsoft Audience Network — with view-through conversions

We’ve made some reporting improvements for Microsoft Audience Ads with view-through conversions. View-through conversions are based on impressions when users see your ad and later convert on your website. Instead of counting clicks, Microsoft Advertising tracks ad impressions related to conversions on your site within a time period that you choose. With these new view-through metrics, you can track the impact of ad exposure on conversions, in addition to conversion rate, cost per acquisition (CPA), revenue, and return on ad spend (ROAS)!

What are the benefits of view-through conversions?

• Enhance your conversion tracking by attributing user actions to impressions.
• See how users are responding to your ads, even if they don’t click on them.
• Get a better understanding of how the Microsoft Audience Network is working for your ads.

View-through conversions are conversions that people make after they have seen your ad, even though they did not click the ad.

Here are the 4 new view-through conversion types we’ve added:

• View-through conversion rate: This is the number of view-through conversions divided by the number of impressions.
• View-through conversion CPA: This is the total amount you have spent divided by the number of view-through conversions.
• View-through conversion revenue: This is your conversion revenue, but only for view-through conversions.
• View-through conversion ROAS: This is your view-through conversion revenue divided by your total ad spend.

Feed improvements on the Microsoft Audience Network

We’re also introducing feed improvements to the Microsoft Audience Network so you can easily manage your feed-based campaigns and filter products with more granularity. You’ll now be able to filter your feed by ID and category, enter multiple values at once, and exclude values. These improvements make it easier for you to narrow down your campaigns to only the products you intend to show, and exclude any of the products you don’t.

For instance, if you’re a retailer and you only want to serve audience ads for items in your feed labeled as Best Sellers, but not the product types Shoes or Jewelry, you can now use these feed improvements to do so (watch the short video below to see how easy it is). For retail advertisers, this means an easier way to show the right products to the right audience — just in time for the holiday season.

If you don’t see this feature in your account yet, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account representative or contact our support team to be enabled.

CPM Pricing comes to the Microsoft Audience Network

Finally, we’re introducing CPM pricing (cost-per-thousand impressions) to standalone audience campaigns targeting U.S., Canada, U.K., Australia, France, Germany, or New Zealand. With CPM pricing, you specify a maximum amount you’re willing to pay for 1,000 impressions, and you’re charged for the impressions on your ad (as opposed to a click). CPM Pricing is for you if you’re already leveraging CPM on other platforms, and/or you care about boosting views as a means of increasing your brand awareness or reach.

To get started with CPM in a new campaign, you can choose Ad impressions (below) if you want to only use the CPM pricing model. You can use other goals and still buy ads using CPM pricing. CPC will also be available in case you want to switch between the two bidding strategies.

Again, if you don’t see this feature in your account yet, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account representative or contact our support team to be enabled.

In-market Audiences expansion and auto-generated remarketing lists

On the search side of things, we’ve expanded In-market Audiences in both segments as well as markets: as of this month, In-market Audiences are available in open beta for LATAM: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. There are also new segments available for both search and audience campaigns in the U.K., Australia, France, Germany and New Zealand markets. To see the latest list of In-market Audiences, see In-market audiences: Reach people who are ready to buy.

Additionally, we have another exciting open beta for audience targeting: Auto-generated remarketing lists! If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to get started with remarketing, or if you’re already using remarketing and want to optimize your performance, this beta is for you: Auto-generated remarketing lists are remarketing lists that are automatically created for you, designed to help you re-engage with users in a faster and easier way and boost performance.

There are three types of auto-generated remarketing lists. You can use one, two, or all three lists together, and along with existing remarketing and audience targeting lists.

• All Visitors list: A list of users who visited the advertiser’s website in the past 30 days.
• All Converters list: A list of users who converted within the past 180 days.
• Smart Remarketing list: A list of users likely to convert, powered by our audience intelligence and designed to deliver a higher conversion rate.

To get started, you’ll need Universal Event Tracking (UET) and active conversion goals set up for the latter two remarketing lists. Please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account representative or contact our support team to be enabled.

The future of Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) with Microsoft Advertising

We also have an announcement related to future plans with Responsive Search Ads. Over time, we’ve found that the more advertisers we have in the marketplace using RSAs, the better for both advertiser performance and improving the intelligence of our machine learning models. To help elevate advertisers’ ROI with the power of our automation and create a simplified cross-platform experience, we’ve decided to align to Google’s newly announced changes: Starting June 30, 2022, RSAs will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard search campaigns. Existing expanded text ads will still serve, but they won’t be able to be edited or added.

We’re continually refining our Responsive Search Ads capabilities, most notably with ad customizers, coming early next year. We hope these changes and continuous improvements will make it easier for you to drive performance with our automated tools. If you’d like to provide feedback, you can provide in-product feedback under the Help section of the online experience, send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com, or connect with us on Twitter. Our new customer feedback platform is releasing later this month.

Competitive insights at the multi-account level

Last but certainly not least, we’ve also launched competitive insights at the multi-account level for advertisers. For those of you ramping up your holiday season, staying on top of your competitors and understanding how they compare to you is of utmost importance. And now these are available at the multi-account level so you can get a full picture of your competitive landscape. For information, see About the Competition tab.

That concludes this month’s roundup! We’ll see you back here on Tuesday, November 2.

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, you can use the new panel, reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.