Copilot for Microsoft Advertising and other updates for May

Welcome to another edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup. At Microsoft Advertising, we’re continually committed to building the Microsoft Advertising platform with clients at the center. It’s not about what we want to build, it’s about what we think will make your jobs easier—and what you’re saying is essential to your success.

For this month’s roundup, we’ll share our product releases that help advertisers drive more results with less effort and create more engaging ads, most notably with our updated user interface and newly released Copilot! See that blog announcement for more generative AI news and partnerships with Direqt and Politico, and look for more detail on Copilot below.

As a reminder, this past month has also seen posts about cricket advertising insights and measurement guidelines for our retail media offerings. We encourage advertisers to check out the rest at the links above.

This month’s top story: A sleek new user interface and Copilot for the Microsoft Advertising platform

We’ve rolled out a new design for the Microsoft Advertising Platform to help simplify the user experience for all advertisers. For starters, our streamlined signup flow for new advertisers lets you import an existing campaign right away or create a hassle-free Performance Max campaign. This campaign brings together our best AI and automation features to help you start out strong by launching a multi-channel campaign to promote your business across the Microsoft Advertising Network.

This update also includes the general availability of Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform. Generative AI is integrated throughout our platform to offer instantaneous and time-saving assistance with AI-recommended assets in campaign creation, image asset creation to add variety to any campaign‘s creative, and answer questions along the way.

Customers get a modernized user interface with several new enhancements, including:

• Overview page – A snapshot of our most popular places in the platform: Performance, Recommendations, Campaigns, and Conversions.
• Campaign diagnostics panel – Quickly assess the performance of a specific campaign up-and-running or whether it needs your attention.

• Customizable navigation menu – Easily pin your most frequently used tools to your left taskbar for easy access.

Microsoft Advertising Platform is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.

Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is now generally available

Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is your new AI companion for digital advertising for creating high-quality marketing easily and efficiently, guiding you through campaign creation and answering questions along the way.

We’ve launched Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform with three key capabilities to help enhance productivity, boost creativity, and provide always-on digital advertising assistance:

• Conversational chat – Your 24/7 digital advertising assistant is always there to provide instantaneous answers, help you navigate the UI, and provide real-time support. For a more hands-on experience, users can still easily access a live agent through chat.

• Asset recommendations – Integrated into your campaign workflow, Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform automatically recommends image and copy assets based on your landing page URL, saving you valuable time and effort in campaign creation.

• Asset creation – Our image creation tool enables anyone to create beautiful imagery with a text prompt. Teams can boost creativity and upskill team members at a fraction of the cost of formal training or studio photography.

With Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform, users are always in control to generate, approve, refine, or recreate assets with the aptitude and agility of generative AI. The resulting increase in asset variety helps fuel more personalized ads for audiences and stronger performance for campaigns.

Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform is available in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.

You can learn more about Copilot and other generative AI updates here, as well as in this post from Thursday.

Get more actionable recommendations on automated bidding with advanced bid strategy statuses

Optimizing your advertising with automated bidding is one of the key levers for customer success, and we at Microsoft strive to continually refine these strategies to help advertisers better achieve their campaign goals.

A new way in which we’re helping advertisers do this is provide them with more information about how their campaigns and bid strategies are performing, and what could be improved to make them even better. This is through a new release of advanced bid strategy statuses that advertisers will now begin seeing in their campaigns (rolling out globally over the next few weeks).

These new strategies include new actionable diagnoses and one-click recommendations that can help you easily boost your campaigns and drive more results with less effort. Here are four new statuses you’ll see in both your campaign and portfolio with customized detail:

• Performance limited by budget. Your campaign’s performance is limited by budget, which means your campaign isn’t performing as well as it could. Increase the campaign budget to [x] in your campaign settings can help ensure you don’t miss out on potential customers.
• Limited by auto-bidding target. Your campaign is limited by the auto-bidding target you set, so you may be missing out on potential opportunities. Changing the bidding target to [x] in your portfolio bid strategies can help ensure you don’t miss out on potential customers.
• Limited by max. CPC. Your campaign is limited because the maximum CPC (cost per click) you set for your bid strategy is too low. Increasing your maximum CPC to [x] or disabling maximum CPC under Bid strategy in your campaign settings can help ensure you don’t miss out on potential customers.
• Limited by inventory. Your campaign is limited by ad inventory (the available ad space), so it isn’t performing as well as it could. You can reduce negative bid adjustments, reduce website exclusions, add new keywords, or add new products to your catalog feed file.

Get information on how to create more engaging responsive search ads with the refreshed ad strength model

In addition to more actionable recommendations in automated bidding, we also want to help advertisers drive more results with less effort in their ad creation, specifically with responsive search ads (RSAs).

We’ve now refreshed our ad strength model for RSAs to better provide recommendations in creating more engaging ads. This new model helps you get real-time feedback on the strength of your ads and specific suggestions on how you can improve them, such as adding more descriptions or including popular keywords. View your ad strength score in ad report and then select Improve ad.

Enhance your multimedia ad relevance and performance with automated calls to action

To help maximize ad engagement for advertisers with less effort, we’re also looking for ways to help advertisers autogenerate assets that will resonate with their customers. To that end, we’re now introducing automated calls to action for multimedia ads, now live for all advertisers. With automated calls to action, we’ll automatically generate calls to action for your multimedia ads based on a predefined list of actions from action extensions. Calls to action will be automatically updated to the best-fitting action text in the multimedia ad copy when serving.

Please note that campaigns serving multimedia ads will be opted in to automated calls to action by default. To opt out, go to your campaign settings and clear the checkbox next to Enable auto-generated assets for multimedia ads. Then, select Save. 

Learn more about multimedia ads here: Multimedia ads (microsoft.com).

Note on Performance Max and smart shopping campaigns importing from Google Ads

As previously announced, if you’ve imported a Performance Max campaign from Google Ads that originally came over as a smart shopping campaign or dynamic search ads (DSA) campaign, it’ll now be automatically upgraded to PMAX. If you are currently using a third-party platform that does not yet support Performance Max such as SA360 or Marin, they will continue to be imported as smart shopping or DSA. Please contact your account representative or Support if you have any further questions about this.

Understand how your assets are performing with expanded asset reporting

Lastly, advertisers being able to see how all of their assets are performing at a high level is also a key way to understand how you can create more engaging ads. To that end, we’re excited to also announce that starting this week, asset reporting for responsive search ads, dynamic search ads, and multimedia ads will now be available at all entity levels.

This means that you’ll now be able to view asset reporting at the ad, ad group, campaign, and account level for all three of these ad types. We hope this is another key lever for advertisers to be able to create more engaging ads with ease.