Responsive Search Ads updates and other news for May

Welcome to the May edition of the Microsoft Advertising product roundup. This past month has seen a lot of great milestones for Microsoft Advertising.

First, our quarterly earnings were released last week. Our search and news advertising revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, increased 23% thanks to our strategic investments in our platform, new product launches, and overall strength in the industry. All this further fuels the continued momentum we’re seeing across our Microsoft Advertising business.

We also had our annual Elevate event for Microsoft Advertising partners, released new studies on the Workday Consumer and shared our 13^th episode of the Download focusing on that topic, and much more.

As far as product announcements go, we also have plenty of news to share. Let’s dive in!

This month’s top story: Deadline for migration to Responsive Search Ads extended to August 29, 2022

While this was announced in its own blog last week, we wanted to include it here as well to make sure everyone knew: We’ve extended the deadline for the migration to Responsive Search Ads (RSAs). Starting on August 29, 2022, RSAs will be the only search ad type that can be created or edited in standard search campaigns. Expanded Text Ads will continue serving along with RSAs, but we will no longer support the ability to create new or edit existing Expanded Text Ads moving forward.

For more on this change and tips for preparing for the August migration, please see this blog.

Microsoft Audience Network enhancements

As always, there’s plenty of exciting news to share about the Microsoft Audience Network and its growth—did you know that it’s now available across 64 markets globally? Here are a few key updates and pilots related to the Microsoft Audience Network:

• CPM pricing is now available across both image and video ads on the Microsoft Audience Network. With manual cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bids, you set the actual cost you want to pay per 1,000 viewed impressions.
• With multi-asset Audience Ads, you can create up to 16 images, up to 15 short headlines, up to 5 long headlines, and up to 5 descriptions. We will automatically serve the best performing combinations to reach the right audience at the right time with the right message.
• Last but not least, we’re currently piloting automated bidding across the Microsoft Audience Network! Currently, enhanced CPC is available so you can maximize conversions on audience campaigns while keeping CPCs below stated bids. More automated bidding strategies are also on the way. If you would like to participate in this pilot, please contact your account representative or our support team.

Manage your Audience Ads’ images within Microsoft Advertising Editor

On the Microsoft Advertising Editor side, we’re releasing ongoing updates to help you manage your Audience Ads campaigns at scale. You can currently do bulk management of campaign settings, bids and modifiers, targeting, audience associations, and ads. As of this week, you can now manage images for your Audience Ads within the Editor tool! This includes creating new ads and uploading, deleting, and replacing images. We’ll be releasing more Editor capabilities for Audience Ads in the near future.

Auto-generated remarketing lists releasing this week

If you’re looking for a fast, easy way to get started with remarketing, or you’re already using it and want to optimize performance, we’re releasing auto-generated remarketing lists this week to help you do just that. Auto-generated remarketing lists are those that Microsoft Advertising creates automatically for you, and they should be leveraged by any advertiser with a Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag. These lists help you reengage with people who are most likely to convert.

There are three types of auto-generated remarketing lists:

• All Visitors. People who have visited your website in the past 30 days.
• All Converters. People who have converted in the past 180 days.
• Smart Remarketing. People who are likely to convert. Smart Remarketing is powered by Microsoft Advertising’s audience intelligence and designed to deliver a higher conversion rate.

Since these lists are automatically created and ready to go, setup is easy: Simply associate the list to your campaigns like other targeting, and you’re all set!

Dynamic Search Ads enhancements and expansions

We have a slew of updates related to Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) in Microsoft Advertising. First and foremost, as of this week, DSAs are now available in Asia Pacific and Latin American markets, including: Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. You can see our full list of where DSAs are available on our help page.

We now also support Exact auto-target URLs for your DSAs. This means that you can now use “URL equals” in addition to the existing “URL contains” to only focus your DSAs on the landing pages you want. And starting next week, DSAs will also be able to support subdomains for advertisers, meaning that you can now add not just top-level domains such as contoso.com, but also mysite.contoso.com.

Finally, we’ve added Ad IDs to the DSA auto-target report. For anyone leveraging asset-based page feeds for DSAs in Google, we have made adjustments to our internal import logic to keep things consistent. Support for this rollout will be complete by the end of May. For more on DSAs, check out About Dynamic Search Ads (microsoft.com).

Custom events for advertisers using Smart Campaigns and Multi-platform campaigns

Many advertisers that use UET have custom events set for certain conversion goals to track certain conversions like website visits, calls, and site-wide purchases. We’re glad to share that this will now be rolling for our small business advertisers over the next few weeks, as well as for anyone using Smart Campaigns, or Multi-platform campaigns.

Custom event tracking is not limited to any given page URLs, so small businesses can start measuring their impact today!

That’s it for May. We’ll have a number of other exciting announcements on this blog later this week and month, so be sure to stay tuned to the Microsoft Advertising blog throughout May! Otherwise, we’ll see you here on June 7 with a recap and another update of what’s to come. Take care, everyone!

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, Twitter, or Instagram. You can also email us at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com or contact Support.