Tag Archive for: Microsoft Advertising

The holidays are approaching and Microsoft Advertising wants to help your brand prepare before the shopping season arrives.

Microsoft Advertising has released a new free guide called “Your Festive Season Marketing Playbook” which includes all the information you could need to prepare the most efficient and impactful ad strategies for the latest holiday trends and shopping behaviors. 

Below, we will share some highlights to help steer your ad strategies in the coming months.

Start Planning Early

The guide encourages brands to start planning their campaigns and budgets early, to avoid falling behind. Data from past years suggests that shopping for the holiday season may start as early as September, with a notable increase in both traffic and purchases between September and October throughout much of the world. 

October Clicks Matter In November and December

Another sign that holiday shopping begins earlier than expected is the discovery that approximately two-thirds of purchases in November and half of December purchases can be traced back to clicks in October. 

Now is when brands are able to plant the seeds in shoppers’ heads that turn into holiday purchases. Using remarketing, in-market audiences, and automated bidding strategies, you can develop these initial clicks into later sales.

Deal Seeking is Up

According to the guide, American consumers are spending much more time hunting for deals than in the past. Around two-thirds of shoppers are now devoting significantly increased time to looking for coupons, promotions, or other types of deals. Compared to other regions, shoppers in this area spend approximately 33% more time using search to find deals compared to the average shopper around the world. 

Desktop Drives Holiday Sales

According to the data collected from the Microsoft Advertising Network, just 28% of holiday ad clicks are made by mobile devices, which only account for 22% of total retail conversions around the holiday shopping season. 

This suggests that desktop devices are contributing to the bulk of holiday shopping activity despite the major rise in mobile shopping over the past few years. 

For more about these shopping trends, ad strategies, and holiday marketing recommendations, download the Festive Season Marketing Playbook for yourself here.

Effective August 1st, Microsoft Advertising will stop running ads from anyone who is not a verified advertiser. 

The company announced the change this week, almost exactly a year after the Microsoft Ads Advertiser Identity Verification program was announced back in June 2022. 

At the time, the company said the verification program was part of their efforts to “enhance digital advertising safety” by reducing deceptive ads on the platform.

To ensure that any valid business can be verified in a timely manner, the process is automated and relies on government-issued personal identification or business-related documents for verification. 

Now that the majority of advertisers on the platform have been fully verified, the company is moving to stop running ads by those who have not undergone the verification process.

This will happen in a few steps:

  1. Starting July 1, new advertisers will be required to be verified before Microsoft Advertising will serve any of their ads. 
  2. Starting July 15th, brands are encouraged to contact Microsoft support if they have not been verified and have not received an email inviting them to become verified.
  3. Lastly, on August 1, Microsoft Advertising will begin only serving ads from verified advertisers.

What Information Microsoft Advertising Gives Users

Once verified, all ads from a Microsoft advertiser include information about the organization(s) behind the ad. This includes the advertiser’s name and location, information about targeting details used to show the ad, and who is paying for the ad. 

For more, read the newly updated help document from Microsoft Advertising about advertiser identity verification.

Microsoft Advertising has begun alerting users that it is cutting support for Twitter across its platform starting April 25, 2023.

This means you will no longer be able to include Multiplatform Smart Campaigns or manage your Twitter account through the Digital Marketing Center (DMC). That includes being unable to schedule, create, or manage tweets and tweet drafts will be removed from the platform on that day.

Additionally, advertisers will be unable to view or track past tweets’ performance and engagement on the platform.

Why This Matters

This is notable for a few reasons. 

DMC is one of the leading tools used to manage multiple social media accounts from one location, including the crucial ability to respond to DMs from all major social networks without signing into multiple accounts and pages. 

This is because the tool is offered for free to all advertisers on Microsoft Ads and is integrated with Microsoft’s other social and paid ad tools for businesses. Once removed, this will create a significant hurdle for many advertisers wanting to manage social ads and engagement efficiently. 

This is also a major loss for Twitter, which has struggled to bring back advertisers since the takeover by Elon Musk. Estimates indicate that up to half of Twitter’s biggest advertisers have left since his purchase of the company.

Just this week, Musk has been making appearances at major marketing and advertising conferences in a bid to attract brands back to Twitter, but the loss of access through major social ad tools will only make Twitter a harder sell to the brands which have already left.

Meanwhile, Microsoft generated over $12 billion dollars in revenue for digital ads last year and is poised to make even bigger gains this year.

Microsoft Advertising is helping you get ready for the new year with three new predictions for upcoming trends in digital advertising. 

As we enter the final month of the year, many are already planning their marketing and ad campaigns for the start of 2023. Unsurprisingly, many of these campaigns will be focused on health and self-betterment as consumers make their New Year’s resolutions.

According to a recent study by Opeepl, approximately 60% of people reported making a New Year’s resolution in 2022 with the most popular resolution being to get healthier.

Even more interestingly, almost half (49%) of those who didn’t make a resolution reported that they still made changes to their lives to improve their wellness around the beginning of the year.

To help you take advantage of this with ads that will connect with health-minded consumers in the start of 2023, Microsoft Advertising shared three predictions for upcoming trends in Health and marketing:

‘Organic Food’ Will Spike In Interest

Microsoft believes clicks for ads related to organic food may leap up to 20% during the week of January 14 compared to the same week in December.

With that in mind, Microsoft recommends planning ahead:

“Target users searching for healthy, nutritious food options in January with In-market Audiences. Our internal forecasting data suggests that clicks will peak during the winter on January 14, so although you should ramp up your budget after the holidays end, make sure you don’t run out midway through the month.”

Target Sports Apparel From Now To Late January

The predictions indicate that searches for sports apparel are likely to surge beginning early this month and lasting through January, creating an opportune time to target customers with related shopping campaigns:

“Use Shopping campaigns to showcase your sports and fitness apparel products late November and early December during holiday shopping sales. Microsoft internal data estimates that consumers will be most heavily searching for gear between the weeks of and November 26 and December 3, but activity will remain high until January.”

‘Fitness & Nutrition’ Searches Regularly Surge In Interest

While it is true that searches for fitness and nutrition-related topics are likely to increase in the new year, Microsoft Advertising also notes that this trend is likely to pop back up throughout the year. Because of this, it may be better to take an “always-on” approach to targeting these areas:

“Using 2021 data as a comparison for what to expect activity wise over the next year, we can assume clicks for nutrition and fitness will peak in January, May, July, and October. Consider an always-on approach since Audience Ads are shown to drive users down the funnel to search tactics.”

Microsoft Advertising announced this week that it will soon start including broad match ad targeting for campaigns using phrase matching. 

The change will occur “mid-May” and is aimed to “simplify keywords and improve your relevancy when reaching customers,” according to the announcement. 

Notably, this means the ad service is keeping in line with Google Ads, who made a similar change in February. 

“So… What Does This Mean For My Ads?”

Essentially, this update means that your ads which are being matched with queries for phrases matching your targeted keyword will also be shown for searches related to the meaning of your keyword. 

For example, Microsoft Advertising says the new system would match a search for “winter vacation in Miami” to the targeted keyword “Miami vacation.”
The company also says it will respect the word order of your keyword “when it’s important – for example, it won’t match ‘milk chocolate’ to the keyword ‘chocolate milk.”

Broad Match Modified Keywords To No Longer Be Offered

With this adjustment, Microsoft Advertising says it will be removing the option to create new broad match modified keywords beginning in August of this year. Existing broad match modified keywords will be treated the same as phrase match keywords. 

With this in mind, there is no need to change over your existing campaigns or keywords.

Planning For This Change

While there is no action for you to take immediately, there are a few things to keep in mind as the update rolls out. 

With the more broad matching included in phrase match campaigns, it will be important to monitor what searches are connecting with your keywords. This more broad approach could lead to potentially irrelevant queries showing your ads. 

On the upside, this change means it should be easier for advertisers to manage their campaigns, especially if they are advertising on both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.