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Better offline conversions management & February key product updates

February is now upon us, which means it’s now time for another roundup of the latest product updates from Microsoft Advertising. We’ve announced lots of exciting releases to help you reach the right audience in recent blogs, but today we’ll focus in on updates to help you deliver the right message with the right technology.

This month’s top story: Easier offline conversions management

Starting this month, we’re upgrading the Offline Conversion Import experience with two key improvements to better automate and accurately analyze the full conversion impact of your Microsoft Advertising campaigns:

  1. Conversion adjustments: You’ll now be able more accurately analyze performance with the ability to update (i.e., restate) the revenue value associated with an existing offline conversion or delete (i.e., retract) offline conversions. For example, if you wanted to account for a cancelled order or partially returned order, you can now make those adjustments within Microsoft Advertising online or via API. Product view of the conversions adjustment field in the Microsoft Advertising user interface.
  2. Automatic scheduling: We heard you — uploading your offline conversions daily, weekly, etc. is a time-consuming task! You can now rely on automation by setting up an FTP or HTTPs location in Microsoft Advertising online with the desired frequency and time of day for recurring uploads. An example of how this new feature can come in handy is to better optimize your automated bidding strategies. Offline conversion data is a powerful optimization signal to maximize your performance, and you can now upload this data daily with ease and minimal resources. Product view of the offline conversions upload scheduler field in the Microsoft Advertising user interface.

Customize your reporting to save time

We shared that the rollout for custom columns began back in December, and it’s now available everywhere! This will help you define your own custom reporting metrics and save time by not having to do manual calculations every time you want to check on your campaign performance. Some example custom columns you can set up include:

  • "Desktop clicks" = Clicks: Computer
  • "Cost per revenue" = Spend / Revenue
  • "Conversions per dollar" = Conversions / Spend
  • "Gross margin" = (Revenue – Spend) / Revenue
Product view of the modify columns view in Microsoft Advertising online.

Custom columns are available as a new category in the Modify columns view.

Optimize Responsive Search Ads using cross-campaign asset reporting

Responsive Search Ads are only as good as the assets they’re composed of. That's why we’re expanding asset reporting to give you a view of how your shared assets are performing across campaigns. You can access this new view from the Ads & Extensions page by selecting the Assets tab. In the Assets tab you can see how many (and which) ads use a shared asset, pin a shared asset, and how the asset is generally performing across campaigns. We suggest keeping assets with favorable Best or Good ratings and adding similar assets like them. Assets with a Low rating should be replaced or removed. This view also allows you to quickly drill-down into the specific ads which are performing well for a given asset.

Dynamic Search Ads continue expansion

With mixed campaigns now fully available in Microsoft Advertising, there’s never been a better time to get into Dynamic Search Ads (DSA). And now that they’re available in the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, and Norway, you can take advantage of them in more markets than ever. See a list of the rest of the countries/regions where Dynamic Search Ads are available on our About Dynamic Search Ads help page.

If you’re looking for a recent refresher on Dynamic Search Ads and how they can help drive traffic and impact to your campaigns, check out Lauren Guity’s video from our holiday 2020 advertising video series!

Increase your ad engagement with new extension updates

Last week, we announced the release of Filter Link Extensions, which are unique in the search advertising landscape and allow you to present many different features under categorized headers so that users can quickly navigate to their key products and offerings. These are now available in all Microsoft Advertising markets.

In terms of other ways to add special offers to your text ads, we also just expanded Promotion Extensions to new markets across Europe and North America: UK, France, Germany, Canada and Australia. These are highly customizable ways to highlight something special in your text ad, and we’re excited to make it available to more Microsoft Advertising users.

Product view of Promotion Extensions as they appear in a sample ad.

Promotion extensions as they appear in a sample ad.

What’s to come

We mentioned target impression share last month as a key feature still being worked on, but here are a few other upcoming items to look out for:

  • In another exciting way to ensure getting the right message to the right audience, we’ll soon be launching an exciting new way to get more control over your Dynamic Search Ads (DSA): static headlines. These will allow you to run pre-approved ad titles on DSAs (either with a unique ad title for each page or a single general headline to all your pages), so you can continue to leverage the discovery power of DSA while maintaining control over ad titles and ad copies.
  • As another reminder from our November update, we’ll be removing average position from performance reporting by March 31, 2021 so you can focus on the prominence metrics that matter most. If you want to test new logic with your automated bidding strategies and the prominence metrics now available, this is a great time to do that!
 

That’s all for now — our future monthly roundups will post on the first Tuesday of every month but stay tuned for more exciting announcements on our blog and Twitter page in the meantime!

Take care all!

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to our ongoing efforts to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.