ALERT TO ANYONE ADVERTISING ON MICROSOFT ADS/BING ADS!
Microsoft has taken extreme measures to trick advertisers into wasting money on absolute garbage traffic.
Here’s our guide to avoiding all worthless traffic from Microsoft Ads:
#1 They’ve secretly added a “Smart goal” conversion to many accounts that counts as a conversion in your reporting.
If you only track purchases, you’ll mistakenly think that you’re receiving purchases and increase/maintain budget, but really you’re receiving nothing of value.
Navigate to Tools → Conversion Goals and click to the left of the “Smart goal” and select “Remove.”
#2 The Audience Network serves ads on garbage sites.
Microsoft has absolutely buried this section to profit from serving advertisers as much worthless traffic as possible.
At the campaign level, go to Settings → Advanced campaign settings → Other settings → Audience ads → Audience Ads Bids and change Decrease bid adjustment to 100%.
#3 Bing, AOL, and Yahoo syndicated search partners are garbage.
They’ve made it even more difficult to turn these off, because you have to do it at the AD GROUP LEVEL.
Yup, have 100 ad groups in a campaign?
Do it for each one.
I suggest doing this in mass using Microsoft Ads Editor, but here’s how you do it from within the platform:
Go to an ad group then Ad group settings → Advanced ad group settings → Ad distribution and select Bing, AOL, and Yahoo search (owned and operated) only.
#4 Search term matching (EVEN FOR KEYWORDS WITH EXACT MATCH TYPE) is garbage.
Remove all broad match keywords.
Go through all matching search terms regularly and add negative phrase match keywords aggressively.
In summary, Microsoft has extremely deceptive practices and you need to be vigilant to ensure you’re spending your ad dollars wisely there.
We’re thinking of just shutting down all campaigns on Microsoft as they continue to worsen their value.
Please share so more people can benefit from this!
