Blog post
Audience Ads releases and other updates for September
Welcome to the September edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup! We’re back recapping the latest updates in the product and beyond. Since the August update, we’ve written on Joint Business Plans for Retail Media success as well as two posts on AI: a dentsu story on how they’ve leveraged Copilot in the Microsoft Advertising Platform and how we’ll be embracing the AI revolution at DMEXCO 2024. Hope to see you there!
Let’s get to this month’s product updates and how they’re empowering advertisers today:
This month’s top story: Making audience ads even more relevant and efficient for advertisers
With Audience ads, we’re helping make display, native, and video even more relevant to an audience and more efficient for advertisers using industry-leading machine learning technology and signals. Audience ads appear in beautiful placements across the web and can be tailored to both the user and the placement at scale, which means better results for you. We continue to introduce new features to help you improve your performance and measure your results.
- Unlock more performance features on display and video
Microsoft Advertising Platform – Display, Video
Later this month you can unlock more performance features on display and video ads, such as more bidding strategies, more targeting options, and conversion tracking. This means you’ll have more options than ever to customize your display and video ads to achieve your goals across the funnel.
- Create more engaging ads with logos and call to actions
Microsoft Advertising Platform – Native (including Performance Max)
We are excited to share that you can now add your business logo and call to actions to your native ads on the Microsoft Advertising Network. Adding these assets will help you to drive higher ad engagement, encourage your customers to take action, and ensure that your brand is front and center. You will have the option to add or import your business logo. By default, the call to action is set to automated. This option will dynamically choose the best call to action from a predefined list. You can also choose your own call to action from the pre-defined list or import from Google if you prefer. You can begin adding these assets to your campaigns now and they will become eligible to serve in the coming weeks starting from September 30th.
- Verify your ads are seen by real people in brand-safe environments, with IAS verification on all bid strategies
Microsoft Advertising Platform – Video, Native, Display (including Performance Max)
Advertisers can now use IAS verification for viewability, invalid traffic, and brand safety and suitability 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.
Several devices running different Microsoft products.
Making Connected TV accessible to more businesses
At Microsoft Advertising, our ambition is to democratize CTV and make it accessible to businesses of all sizes. With our Connected TV ads, you can easily access a network of global, premium, streaming services, like Netflix, Roku, Hulu, Max, Fox, Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, Paramount+, LG, Discovery+, Samsung TV Plus and more. And we continue to introduce product enhancements to make CTV accessible to more businesses, giving brands the chance to easily connect with consumers in new ways.
These updates enable you to:
- Create longer videos, with expanded support for video durations
Microsoft Advertising Platform, Microsoft Invest - CTV
We’ve now added support for 45 and 75 second video ad creatives. This update is particularly relevant for pharma advertisers to meet the new pharma requirements in the US, but is beneficial for all to enhance creative with longer videos.
- Generate new creatives with AI-powered asset recommendations
Microsoft Advertising Platform - CTV
Copilot’s AI-powered asset recommendations are integrated into campaign workflows to help advertisers unlock greater productivity and agility across search, native, display, and video. Now, this capability is live for Connected TV ads, where it uses your website and existing assets to generate and populate ad copy and assemble TV-ready videos with your text and images.
Logos of different streaming services.
Harness the power of Microsoft media in new ways via three new Microsoft O&O Packages
At Microsoft Advertising, digital buyers can now harness the power of Microsoft media in new ways to drive value for your brand, through three brand new packages. These offerings all help you reach a massive and growing audience, while focusing on your goals for the season—whether it’s capturing the full power of fall and holiday shopping moments, making your new movie release really sizzle (perfect for streaming or gaming, too!), promoting your new product launch to the masses, or reaching audiences across the most engaged screens.
Check out our 3 new packages below, and ask your sales partner to keep you updated as new packages release!
- Unlock the power of seasonal spending with Fall and Holiday Seasonal Moments packages. Easily reach audiences during key shopping and consumer event periods this fall, including Premiere League Start, Oktoberfest, Halloween, Season of Giving, and more. With takeovers available on MSN homepage and vertical pages that make a big impression to drive performance, you can take advantage of special seasonal promotional pricing (20% off!) with a minimum spend commitment.
Visualization of possible ads locations.
- Product Launch packages offer prominent units for new releases, empowering you to boost performance by captivating audiences with video, audio, and interactivity capabilities of HTML5. With takeovers on MSN homepage or vertical pages, you can leverage the full power of your trailer or release assets, by utilizing this ad format known for driving higher CTR and lead generation. Whether it’s the latest blockbuster, a binge-worthy TV series, the hottest new game, or the newest electronics device, we’ve got you covered.
Mock up of ads on the platform.
- Cross-Screen Gaming packages ensure your brand reaches audiences across their favorite entertainment on both the big screen and the most personal screen. CTV and gaming are two of the most mainstream forms of entertainment, with blockbuster series and addictive casual games captivating our attention. 85% of people use another device while watching TV, and for gamers, gaming is the number one second-screen activity.1 Appear across premium partner CTV and Activision Blizzard mobile gaming supply to drive brand awareness and affinity across the most engaged screens with a highly engaged audience.
Continuing to enhance Performance Max for advertisers
Performance Max is the marquee Microsoft campaign type for search-first buyers to take advantage of the best of Microsoft’s industry-leading AI, including how to best capture our emerging generative AI experiences from Microsoft Copilot. We continue to evolve our Performance Max (PMAX) offering in Microsoft Advertising, such as with a refreshed UI, as well as pilots of features like brand exclusions. Here’s a breakdown of a few other key updates:
- With SA360 now supporting PMAX, this means that as of last week, we’ve now implemented changes so that any PMAX campaigns imported via Google Import will now be converted to PMAX campaigns on Microsoft Advertising, instead of being converted to Smart Shopping and DSA campaigns.
- Search term insights report is rolling out to all advertisers over the next few weeks, available for all campaign types, including Performance Max.
- Finally, Search themes are available for pilot in Performance Max. These are words or phrases you associate within a campaign to help Microsoft Advertising optimize your campaign during the learning period. To get enabled for this pilot, reach out to your account manager or contact Support.
Search themes interface example.
Look out for another upcoming post coming soon on Performance Max on how it helps you best capture the emerging generative AI experiences from Microsoft Copilot, and for more optimization tips as we gear up for the holiday season.
Improve your engagement with fast web indexing via IndexNow
For those highly interested in advertising on our consumer Microsoft Copilot experiences, Performance Max is the key campaign type for doing so. However, keeping your website fresh for these ad placements is incredibly important: Slow web indexing can lead to missed opportunities with your website and can disrupt campaigns.
This is where IndexNow comes in. Check out the new blog post to learn how IndexNow can help your Dynamic Search ads (DSAs) and ads in Copilot reach their full potential, increase click-through rates, enhance engagement, and ultimately, boost conversions.
Max Conversion value bid strategy now available for portfolio bid strategies
Finally, for those looking to optimize high-value conversions and the total sales value of your campaigns, the Max Conversion value bid strategy is now available for portfolio bid strategies. To learn more about these strategies and portfolio bidding, see here: Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies
Conclusion
That's all for this month's roundup blog. We’ll see you on October 2nd with another recap. Take care!
Help us improve Microsoft Advertising
Your comments and feedback are integral to shape and improve our product. You can use the Microsoft Advertising Feedback portal, in-product feedback, X, and as always, contact Support.
[1] Activision Blizzard Media Simultaneous Media Study via Taluna Insights, Dec 2021.
