This year was filled with major updates made by Microsoft Advertising. One of the biggest change was updating their paid search platform name from Bing Ads to Microsoft Ads. This and many more of such important updates mentioned in this annual roundup for this year.
Microsoft Ads Editor Changes
Starting with some improvements made to scheduling your import, choose from new import options such as adjust bids, specify settings for targeting, modifying tracking templates etc. All this to make importing your campaigns more easier than before. This was followed by updating Microsoft Ads Editor with Price Extension, so that advertisers can easily manage them in bulk. By the end of the year, Microsoft Ads redesigned the look and feel of the Editor to help advertisers take their campaign to the next level.
Bing becomes Microsoft Advertising
One of the major updates by Microsoft was when they changed their name from Bing Ads to Microsoft Advertising. This was done clearly to stay more close to their brand and translate that across to the users. Alongside they also introduced some updates to the Microsoft Audience Network. Later the year, there were some success stories to share the compelling performance of Microsoft Audience Network amidst the launch of some new audience targeting solutions (product audiences and similar audiences)
Updates and Improvements made in Reporting
Improvements were made to search term reporting by extending search terms management capabilities to shopping campaigns. They also made ‘Search Terms’ a standalone tab to make it easier for users to find the search terms grid.
Later this year, Microsoft announced the product negative keywords conflict report to help identify product ads being blocked by negative keywords, the negative keywords’ match types and the level of conflict that has got triggered.
Ad Format Updates
Local inventory ads were announced this year to help advertisers show their products and local store information. Some existing ad formats witnessed some changes, such as, page feeds for Dynamic search ads were added early this year, whereas later an additional description field and longer dynamically generated ad titles and the Responsive Search Ads was open in beta for all global customers. 10 new features were added to Microsoft Shopping Campaigns to improve your campaigns.
To further make your ad experience profitable, some helpful measures were introduced. With Performance Metrics, advertisers can get clear insight and a thorough understanding about where your ad appears in the search results page.
Time Saving Tactics
With Ad Customizers you can pass parameters in the ad copy that helps improve ad quality and reduces set up time. To make your multi-account management experience more smooth, new updates were announced to help account manager easily handle multiple accounts and save crucial time. In addition, campaign level associations was rolled out to again save time and apply audience targeting to multiple ad groups in your account.
Discontinuation of existing features
Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that they will be discontinuing the option to create destination URLs. It was recommended to migrate and upgrade existing destination URLs to final URLs. Following this they rolled out Parallel Tracking, also the final URL suffix, to ensure a much faster page load time.
Also, this year, Microsoft Advertising decided to discontinue their Accelerated Budget Strategy and existing campaigns using this budget strategy were to automatically start serving as Standard Budget Strategy.
Globally Released Features
Maximize Click was made available worldwide to help advertisers get as many clicks as possible within their budget. Also, action extension was globally released, allowing advertises to highlight a clear call-to-action in their text ads.
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