Performance Max updates and other updates for October

Welcome to another edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup. We’re now into the last three months of the calendar year, which means peak holiday season has arrived for many advertisers. This past month, we’ve posted our holiday season marketing playbook for 2024, which is packed with insights and tips to make your advertising campaigns more successful. Take a look at the sneak peek of key insights you’ll find inside, and find the full playbook here.

We’ve also posted 3 surprising festive shopping insights and more on how to maximize your campaigns during the retail rush. Also, did you hear about all that happened at DMEXCO and our Ad Selection API?

At Microsoft Advertising, we’re continuing to release new features and enhancements that help advertisers drive more results and reach more customers with less effort. Let’s take a look at the latest updates:

This month’s top story: Performance Max and other campaigns now supported with search term insights reports, and other Performance Max pilots

As shared in previous blog posts and recent case studies, Performance Max campaigns are the optimal way to help advertisers reach more customers with the right message at the right time with our industry-leading AI. It’s also the best way to ensure advertisers are showcasing their ads in Copilot chat: for example, did you know that multimedia ads that are powered by Performance Max campaigns have a 3.5x boost in impressions, and 5x for product ads? Performance Max-powered ads in Copilot also have a 63% increase in conversion rates compared to search ads in Copilot.¹

Regardless, whether in Copilot or in traditional search, consumers are expressing their search intent in different ways each and every day. This is where search term insights reports come in, which are now available to all advertisers. These reports allow advertisers to gain valuable insights into how users search for their business, analyzing specific search terms that triggered your ads during a selected time frame and then grouping them into relevant categories with key performance metrics.

Whether you’re using Performance Max or other campaign types, these new insights into search terms will help enable advertisers to better optimize their assets and content strategy to reach more customers with the right message.

In addition to this release, Performance Max also continues to support a pilot for brand exclusions, which help advertisers indicate which branded search queries you don’t want ads to serve on. Finally, URL rules at the asset group level will be available as a pilot in mid-October, as well as personalized recommendations for upgrading DSA campaigns to Performance Max.

There’s much more to come in our Performance Max journey, including support for video assets and new customer acquisition goal settings. Stay tuned!

More bidding and targeting options for Display ads 

Display ads allow you to showcase your brand and reach a relevant audience across the web on sites like MSN, Microsoft Edge, Outlook and publisher partners.

This month, we are excited to share that you can now use more bidding strategies and targeting options on your display ads, as well as the ability to track conversions directly in the Microsoft Advertising Platform.

You can choose from a variety of bid strategies, including:

• Manual CPM – Set the highest amount you want to pay for 1,000 viewable impressions.
• Enhanced CPC – Set a bid you want to pay per click and automatically optimize in real time to increase your chance of conversion.
• Maximize conversions and target CPA – Get as many conversions as possible – with the option to set a given CPA target.

And you can layer on audience targeting, including:

• In-market audiences – Reach curated lists of customers who have shown purchase intent signals within a particular category.
• Dynamic remarketing - target users based on specific product IDs they’ve interacted with to show users ads with those same product IDs.
• Custom audiences – Reach users by using your own customer data from your data management platform to create richer user segments.
• Combined lists – Combine your existing audience lists to enhance your targeting strategy
• LinkedIn Profile targeting- Target potential customers based on their LinkedIn profile information
• Predictive targeting – Use predictive targeting to easily find new audiences that you may not have considered targeting, who are more likely to convert.
• Impression-based remarketing (in pilot) - Leave a lasting impression and drive greater efficiencies across the full funnel based on ad exposure.

Verify your ads are seen by real people in brand-safe environments, with IAS verification on all bid strategies

Advertisers can now use IAS verification for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety on native, display and video ads with any bid strategy. If you are partnering with IAS, simply add your IAS tag URL on your ads within the Microsoft Advertising Platform.

See more on recent collaborations between IAS and Microsoft here.

New actionable recommendations for your automated bidding strategies

Finally, for advertisers looking for more actionable diagnoses and one-click recommendations for their automated bidding strategies, we now have two new ones available your search, shopping, and Performance Max campaigns. These statuses will help you identify when your campaign isn’t performing as well as it could, and whether that performance is limited by budget or your automated bidding target.

For more information, please see the frequently asked questions about auto-bidding strategy statuses here: Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies