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Microsoft Advertising Network policies

30 June 2023

Introduction

Microsoft Advertising Network policies help advertisers and partners learn what makes a great ad, as well as what is and isn’t allowed in them. We require our advertisers and partners to comply with our policies at all times. These policies apply across Microsoft Advertising’s Networks, including: Search, Audience, Display, and Native.

We take user safety and security seriously. We strive to provide a safe online environment for our users and our partners. We reserve the right in our discretion, to manually, or systematically (through automated detection), reject or remove any ad or campaign that may violates our terms or policies, or suspend your access to the Microsoft Advertising Network if we detect suspicious activity, suspect that you willfully or repeatedly violated our terms or policies, or if we detect activities that are unlawful or that pose a risk to user safety or the health and quality of our network (for example, behavior intended to circumnavigate system checks, suspicious payment activity, and repeated policy violations). See Impacts to your Microsoft Advertising Account to learn more. You may not be able to resume your ad campaigns unless you resolve the violation to our satisfaction.

We update our policies from time to time. We will provide notice of material policy changes. Please see our Change Log for more information on policy changes.

Our policies apply across our network and all ad types unless specified otherwise as follows:

SEARCH

Search policies apply to the Microsoft Search Network, and Microsoft Audience Network. Additional publisher specific restrictions may apply.


AUDIENCE

Audience policies, in addition to the Search policies described above, apply to Microsoft Audience Network placements specifically.


DISPLAY

Display policies apply to Display advertising served by our partners on Microsoft owned and operated properties including MSN, Microsoft Start, Xbox, Outlook.com, Microsoft Casual Games (MCG), and relevant Microsoft mobile applications. These policies apply to all the publishers listed above unless otherwise specified.


NATIVE

Native policies apply to Native advertising served by our partners on Microsoft owned and operated properties including MSN, Microsoft Start, Xbox, Outlook.com, Microsoft Casual Games (MCG), and relevant Microsoft mobile applications. These policies apply to all the publishers listed above, unless otherwise specified.


Additional information:

SEARCH

In our commitment to transparency, some account and campaign data may appear in our public ad disclosure solutions and transparency reports. Some examples of this data may include: the advertiser name, who paid for the ad, run dates of the ad, estimated impressions by market, or generic targeting parameters.

Accounts without a compliant or up-to-date payment method may see a rejection in the system until the payment method has been updated or corrected. For additional information on accepted payment methods in your market, please visit Choosing a payment method for Microsoft Advertising and Paying by credit and debit card. For more information on account holds due to payment issues, please visit Why is my account on hold?.

If ads are shown outside of a targeted market due to an advertiser’s account settings, we apply policies related to the geographical areas where the ads show. 

For information about advertising policy enforcement levels, including egregious violations, please visit "Impacts to your Microsoft Advertising Account". If your account has been impacted due to a violation, you may not be able to log-in to your account or access its contents without contacting customer support to resolve the issue.

If we suspect or detect unauthorized activity or access on your account which we reasonably believe to be hacking or another form of account compromise we may temporarily suspend access to your, account to prevent unauthorized content from serving until we resolve the security threat.