Blog post
An ads ecosystem built for the AI era
The rules of marketing are being rewritten. Budgets are tighter, proving value is non-negotiable, and AI is everywhere. But for most marketers, it still feels like a black box.
Picture a marketer reviewing their lead generation campaign before a marketing review. They need to reach senior IT decision-makers, not just anyone in professional services. Conversions dropped last week. And now they need to walk into that room and explain exactly how AI is optimizing their campaigns and why.
That's not a hypothetical. That's a Tuesday.
Today, as part of our Spring Summit announcements, we're sharing what Microsoft Advertising is innovating to help marketers win. We're investing across three key areas: high-value audience reach, performance that's easier to get and prove, and AI that gives you more control, not less. Here's what we're launching.
Reach the right audiences across the Microsoft ecosystem
From the office to the living room, Microsoft’s ecosystem lets you reach high-intent audiences throughout the day as they move seamlessly across life, work, and play. Microsoft Advertising is the only platform with LinkedIn's professional targeting capabilities built in—so you can reach the right professional audiences that no other platform can match.
We already offer options like job title and company name targeting. Now with expanded LinkedIn profile targeting, you can also build audience cohorts for job seniority and customized company lists. Engage potential customers across 10 job seniority levels—CXO, VP, Director, and more—and get your message in front of the right people within companies. Likewise, you can build custom lists of companies, like recent event attendees or top account-based marketing prospects to deliver more tailored messaging.
Lastly, building your ideal audience can be a tricky step in campaign creation. It can be hard to know if you’ve fully translated your ideal audience into platform-specific campaign settings and if you’ve selected everything you should. Today, we also introduced Audience generation, our AI-powered audience assistant that helps advertisers express audience attributes using natural language. It’s also an industry-leading capability that generates new audiences that are specific to each audience prompt.
Simplifying campaign management
Being a digital marketer means constant context-switching: jumping between screens, chasing metrics, and piecing together a picture that should be immediate. When we set out to refresh the Microsoft Advertising Platform web experience, we had a simple mission in mind: to make everything easier and faster to do. Easily scan campaign health, quickly surface diagnostics, and act—all directly from the campaign table without navigating layers of menus.
Likewise, we could all use a reliable, knowledgeable assistant to help answer our questions instantly throughout the day. Questions like, "Performance increased by 18% last week. What happened?" used to mean hours of digging through reporting. With Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform, you can have a quick conversation to get to the bottom of it.
So we’re announcing two new ways Copilot in Microsoft Advertising Platform enables faster decisions:
Performance shift root cause analysis explains why performance spiked or dropped—whether it's an ad delivery issue, a bidding strategy change, or a competition signal—so you know exactly what to adjust next.
Conversion tracking diagnostics validates that your UET tags and conversion goals are set up correctly, catching issues before they impact results.
Drive better campaign results
While a simpler interface helps you act faster, driving results is the ultimate objective.
Today, we also announced AI Max for Search to bring the power of AI into one of your most tedious, yet important responsibilities: optimizing campaigns. We’ve already witnessed early adopters of AI-optimized text assets improve their CTR by 5%.1
Next, we’re rolling out new controls to help you steer asset generation to make sure your creative is brand-aligned and legally compliant. Term exclusions allow users to specify exact terms to omit from ad copy, while Messaging constraints enable users to define a broader set of brand, legal, and product guidelines. These join our Brand kit (where you can define brand voice, logos, and business name) as tools that help advertisers generate creative assets at scale that accurately reflect their brand identity and product offerings while also making stakeholder reviews simpler.
Great creative is a cornerstone of advertising to introduce your brand and products to new customers. Yet finding new customers remains one of the most expensive challenges in marketing. Most campaign tools aren't built to solve it; they're built to convert the demand that already exists.
Performance Max goes further. Advertisers using Microsoft Advertising’s Performance Max see an average 8% increase in incremental conversions. We observe even higher uplift as advertisers allocate more of their budgets to Performance Max to get the full benefits of cross-channel, AI-powered optimization.2 With New customer acquisition goals, you can tell Performance Max to actively go find net new customers—building demand and converting it in one motion.
Reaching new customers is one thing. Understanding what moved them is another. Data-driven attribution, now in the Microsoft Advertising Platform fixes that. Last-click attribution has a well-known blind spot. It hands all the conversion credit to the final touchpoint and ignores everything else. That means your bidding optimization misses the other moments that actually drove the conversion. Data-driven attribution (DDA) is a new attribution model that assigns credit across the full customer journey, so your bidding follows what actually moves the needle, not just what closed it. With DDA, Vego Garden, one customer in the beta, unlocked reach they couldn't access before, nearly doubling conversion volume while keeping CPA stable and ROI healthy.
Microsoft is the partner for the AI era
Whether you want to engage with new audiences, simplify your workflows, or drive and attribute stronger performance results, Microsoft is the partner for the AI era. Microsoft is built on trust. Advertisers of all sizes rely on us to engage the right audiences to deliver better performance and ROI.
Reach out to your account team to join pilots for:
- LinkedIn profile targeting for Job Seniority and Company Lists, currently in pilot in the U.S. and Canada for Search ads
- Audience generation, currently in pilot in the U.S. and Canada for Audience ads
- AI Max for Search, currently in pilot globally, excluding China
- Term exclusions, piloting later this month for Performance Max and Responsive Search ads globally, excluding China
Or log in today to test drive our new Copilot capabilities. We’re excited to hear what you do with us next.
[1] Microsoft internal data, Global, February 2026. Results are based on a randomized experiment comparing Responsive Search ad campaigns with AI-optimized text generation enabled versus a matched control group with text optimization turned off.
[2] Microsoft internal data, Global, September 2024 – September 2025
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