Feed updates for Shopping campaigns and other product updates for April

We’re back with another Microsoft Advertising product roundup. Last month, in lieu of a typical roundup, we spotlighted our Microsoft Advertising Accelerate announcements on transforming the future of audience of engagement, including brand agents and App campaigns.

Besides those exciting announcements, we’ve also covered spring shopping and Ramadan trends, how generative AI is shaping the future of marketing, and easy ways to scale with the power of Google Import.

In today’s roundup, we’ll cover new ways we’re making Shopping campaigns, audience ads, and Performance Max (PMax) management easier, along with a few other updates. Let’s dive right in! 

This month’s top story: Managing your Shopping campaigns now just got easier with Test Feed and Primary Feed

Two new exciting updates have arrived as of this week, designed to give you more flexibility, reduce complexity, and enhance the management of your Shopping campaigns.

First, we're excited to introduce the new Test Feed, which allows merchants to easily test validation errors without affecting their live listings—even when using the same product IDs and markets. To support this, we’ve made the following update in the Microsoft Advertising Platform UI: 

The "Enable publishing" checkbox in online product feeds has now been replaced by a "Use feed for testing only" checkbox. This now ensures a clear distinction between live and test feeds.

Key things to know:

• Products uploaded to a test feed will not appear in the store summary, ensuring that your live product data remains accurate and unaffected. 

• To safeguard against unintended changes, feeds are not reprocessed when the testing checkbox is toggled. If you disable the setting for a feed that was originally marked as test, you’ll need to resubmit the products in that feed. 

• If you enable an active feed for testing only, the products may continue serving for a few hours before transitioning fully to test mode. 

Second is the simplified setup for Local Inventory ads with the new Primary Feed.

Previously, setting up Local Inventory ads required three separate feeds: 1. Online product feed (online feed), 2. Local product feed (local feed), and 3. Local product inventory feed. With the introduction of Primary feed, we are streamlining this process and reducing complexity. Now, you only need two feeds: Primary feed and Local product inventory feed. 

Key things to know:

• If you’re not currently running Local Inventory ads: Starting April 1st, your online product feed (online feed) will be automatically upgraded to the Primary feed. This upgrade will not impact the delivery or performance of your current Shopping campaigns. Additionally, this change will make it easier to set up Local Inventory ads if you decide to do so in the future. 

• If you’re already running Local Inventory ads: Your current campaigns will remain unchanged. We will transition you to the Primary feed over the next few months and will provide proper notification before we make any changes.

These updates are designed to give you more flexibility, reduce complexity, and enhance the management of your Shopping campaigns. We’re excited to roll out these improvements and look forward to hearing your feedback! 

Audience ads updates: Disclaimers, additional video support, and more

For advertisers that need to tell users about any consent or legal notices within your ads, we’re excited to announce the release of disclaimers for audience ads. This allows you to run native ads while ensuring that ads comply with industry regulations and legal requirements, as well as provide clarity and transparency to your consumers.

Disclaimers can be added to Audience ads with native ads. We currently do not support disclaimers for display, online video or connected TV. Support for disclaimers in Performance Max is expected to release in the coming months, and we’ll keep advertisers updated on developments. 

Other updates for Audience ads this month include: 

• Longer video ads and support for more video sizes: Advertisers can now upload 9:16 (vertical) video creatives to serve in more placements across the Microsoft Advertising Network when running online video ads and Premium Streaming. This is a great opportunity to leverage any existing social assets you might have to enhance your video strategy on Microsoft Advertising. 

• Support for 90-second video creatives: Advertisers can now upload video assets that are up to 90 seconds in duration for online Video ads and Premium Streaming. This is particularly useful for clients in sensitive verticals like pharma. 

• Longer short headlines: When creating Audience ads, advertisers can now input 40 characters for short headlines (increased from 30 characters) to provide more information directly within your ads. This update also makes it easier to copy campaigns from other platforms using Google import.

New unique signals for Performance Max and other updates

Continuing from our last product roundup update covering how we’re providing advertisers more tools for Performance Max, here are the latest updates:

• LinkedIn profile targeting as an audience signal is now generally available to advertisers in all markets where LinkedIn Profile targeting is available! This includes markets such as U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and many more. See the full list of markets here, and start including those as an audience signal in our Performance Max campaign. 

• Audience insight reports and asset-level conversion metrics are now generally available to advertisers using Performance Max campaign, so you can get the confidence that your campaigns are working and make adjustments to your audiences and assets on an ongoing basis. We recommend refreshing your creative every 4-6 weeks for optimal performance. 

• Conversion value rules and new customer acquisition goal strategy are still in pilot, and we encourage advertisers to hand raise for these pilots and start using them. Additional hand raisers for the latter pilot are expected to be added in mid-to-late April. 

Finally, two other updates to know with Performance Max:

• Starting this week, we'll be initiating a clean-up for certain final URLs to improve the ability to crawl websites and auto-generate assets for PMax campaigns imported from Google. This will prevent validation errors and improve campaign performance. No action is required from advertisers.

• Also starting this week, we’ll be refreshing our ad preview and available aspect ratios to better reflect the available placements for Microsoft Advertising. This means adding four new aspect ratios (2.01:1, 1.69:1, 1.53:1, and 1.24:1) and removing three aspect ratios (1.78:1, 1.33:1, 1.5:1). No action is required, however we encourage advertisers to go into Performance Max asset groups and select Include to utilize the newly supported aspect ratios. More information on creative specs are here.

Raising bids to the minimum for all imported campaigns

Since March 25, 2025 (UTC), Microsoft Advertising has automatically raised bids to the minimum for imported campaigns to ensure that campaigns can be imported smoothly. The bid raise is minimal, and users cannot opt out of this bid raise. Users can check the minimum bids and budgets in our help content for more details. 

Deprecating Optimization Score in Microsoft Advertising Platform

Starting April 8, 2025 (UTC), Microsoft Advertising will begin deprecating Optimization Score on the Microsoft Advertising Platform. This deprecation will roll out to advertisers incrementally. Optimization Score has helped advertisers understand their account optimization status and potential, providing a score from 0% to 100% with targeted optimization recommendations.

While Optimization Score has provided valuable guidance to millions of advertisers, with the rapid transformation of the digital advertising ecosystem, a new, more advanced Digital Maturity Score will be introduced onto the Microsoft Advertising Platform in May 2025. Driven by AI, the Digital Maturity Score will provide clear optimization paths and substantial ROI improvements with an easy-to-use interface. Advertisers can quickly identify and address key issues, optimize their accounts step-by-step, and track ROI improvements with confidence. Please stay tuned for our May product announcement. 

Conclusion

That's all for this month's roundup blog. We’ll see you back here on May 6 with another recap of what else is to come in Microsoft Advertising. Take care!

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