Enhanced conversions and other updates for February

Welcome to the February edition of our monthly roundup blog. Today we’re featuring some updates on how we’re helping advertisers reach more valuable audiences across Microsoft’s network and drive performance goals with less effort.

We’re also providing an update on a recent announcement on Hotel Center subaccounts. Let’s dive in!

This month’s top story: Take control of your conversion destiny with Enhanced conversions

In a changing privacy landscape, Microsoft is working to provide tools to help advertisers prepare for a new era of tracking. One way advertisers can do this is with Enhanced conversions, which is currently in beta for advertisers in Americas and Europe and rolling out to all markets in the coming weeks.

With Enhanced conversions, you can supplement existing conversion measurements by using privacy-safe customer first-party data, such as email and phone number. This allows you to:

• Improve the accuracy of your conversion measurement. With precise conversion tracking that truly reflects your campaign performance, we’ll now connect the dots between ad interactions and conversions like never before.
• Seamlessly track cross-device conversions. Enhanced conversions enables conversion attribution across multiple devices, providing a holistic view of your customer journeys. No matter where they click and where they convert (such as in-store), you’ll stay informed.
• Embrace privacy with confidence. Stay ahead of privacy regulations while harnessing the power of data. Enhanced conversions use hashed and privacy-safe user information, which ensure compliance without compromising results.

To get started, you’ll need to have online or offline conversion tracking setup and ready to receive conversions.

• If you’re using online conversions, you’ll need to follow UI instructions to copy and paste a code snippet into their website, similar to instrumenting the UET tag snippet.
• If you’re using offline conversions, you’ll need to follow the help page instructions to format and hash the user 1P data before uploading it onto the UI.

If you’re an advertiser who’s already getting this key first-party information from successful conversions, then set up Enhanced conversions for more advanced customer matching and client prospecting. This is currently in beta and will be rolling out to all customers in the coming weeks.

For more information, see the help page and look for other ways we’re helping advertisers navigate this changing privacy landscape in the future.

New targeting capabilities to reach valuable audiences

In the world of in-market audiences, we’re introducing new targeting capabilities to help reach your ideal audiences.

In US/CA, in-market audiences for company size and job titles are now available. These allow you to target potential customers by their titles and company size, which is leveraged from LinkedIn profile information.

This is now available anywhere you can use in-market audiences today, which includes display, native, and connected TV. More updates such as market expansion and income in-market audiences are coming soon.

For more information and the list of available in-market audiences, see In-market audiences: Reach people who are ready to buy (microsoft.com)

The new and simplified way to set up campaigns that align to your goals

We’ve made campaign creation easier, now allowing you to set up your campaigns in just a few steps! Simply do the following:

• Select the goal you’re looking to achieve with your campaign.
• Choose from the best campaign types for your goal.
• Follow the steps to get your campaign set up in just a few minutes.

Advertisers are permitted to switch back to the old campaign creation view if they wish, but we’d love to hear the reasons why! When prompted in Microsoft Advertising online, you can provide feedback on the new campaign creation workflow.

Update to Hotel Center subaccounts deprecation date

Last month we announced that, beginning February 6, subaccounts in Hotel Center will no longer run, and advertisers will not be able to manage their campaigns, unless they migrated to Lodging Campaigns.

In response to valuable customer feedback and acknowledging the need for additional preparation for the transition to Lodging Campaigns, we decided, for the foreseeable future, to pause the deprecation of subaccounts in Hotel Center. Advertisers will also continue to manage their campaigns through Hotel Center as currently.

We’re strongly encouraging advertisers to migrate to Lodging Campaigns as soon as possible to avoid future disruptions. Once you complete your migration to Lodging Campaigns, you’ll need to bid down all bids to zero, to suspend all subaccounts or hotel groups in Hotel Center, and effectively stop serving your campaigns.

Updates to asset reporting

Lastly, RSA (responsive search ad) campaign asset reporting is now available at Campaign and Ad group levels. You can access this data by selecting the campaign or ad group you’re interested in and navigating to the Assets grid. The Assets grid will be scoped down to include assets from the campaign or ad group you have selected.

Wrap up

That’s all for this month’s roundup blog. We’ll see you back here on March 5 with another recap of what else is to come in Microsoft Advertising. Take care!

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