“With this strategy, you set your budget, where you want your ads to appear, and your Target Impression Share, and Microsoft Advertising automatically sets your bids,” wrote Kevin Salat, Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft Advertising.
When to use this strategy. Microsoft Advertising’s announcement has recommendations for when to use target impression share bidding including finding more visibility and awareness, gaining a competitive advantage, and increasing the likelihood of more click and conversion volume.
Best practices. Salat also included some best practices for those just trying out the target impression share bidding strategy. “Start with low-risk campaigns setting an impression share to target based on historical performance at first,” he said. This gives the AI time to learn and determine performance over the learning period. Salat also recommends using experiments “in A/A mode for 1-2 weeks before testing the strategy.” Salat also does not recommend setting a max CPC cap because it can limit performance.
Why we care. This strategy could be helpful for those who trust AI to drive their bid strategy. Automation has been taking over a lot of paid advertising, so it makes sense if search marketers may be wary of this at first, but Microsoft’s best practices could help ensure that you’re using the right strategy for your campaign goals.
Other news from Microsoft Advertising:
Product conversion goals. In the same announcement blog, Microsoft launched product conversion goals for Shopping Campaigns or other feed-based campaigns. With these “you’ll now be able to get a better understanding of the products your customers are buying after clicking on your ads,” said Salat.
Automated extensions. Beginning in August there will be new automated extensions in Microsoft Advertising:
- Dynamic Location enhances ads with location information from your location extensions and Bing Maps
- Dynamic Multimedia enhances ads with multimedia assets, such as images and videos (begins flighting in early 2022)
- Syndication Decorations enhance ads with additional decorations added by search partners.
Account organization. Advertisers will also be able to organize their accounts with a new labeling system. This will be helpful for advertisers with multiple accounts. “Account-level labels will help you easily tag accounts, campaigns, ads, and keywords in your management scope with labels and also allow you [to] pivot your reports and insights with those labels,” wrote Salat.
Unified account changes. With the latest update, “users of unified campaigns are now able to manage multiple sub-accounts underneath a single parent account,” according to the announcement. Users will be able to do the following:
- Create multiple unified campaigns accounts underneath the same manager account.
- Create a mix of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts underneath the same manager account.
- Link to and from manager accounts that contain a combination of unified campaigns and expert mode accounts.
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