Stay on top of your notifications

Microsoft Advertising puts your notifications and solutions in one place for clearer focus on the important items.

Review your notifications, including critical alerts, standard alerts, and new feature announcements, by selecting the bell icon at the top of every page in Microsoft Advertising. If you have more than one account, you can also access the Accounts Summary page to view the Notifications table that's located on the Notifications tab. Regardless of where you read your notifications, they'll be shown in a specific order.

The most important alerts always come first

If you've been using Microsoft Advertising for a while, you'll remember three icons on the top of each page that split alerts into separate categories. The notifications bell unifies these icons and prioritizes the messages for you. Notifications are sorted by their urgency level, which is indicated by colored icons.

Notification type What it means
Critical (red circle icon)

Urgent or important issues at the account level—for example, account management, billing, or payment problems that might keep your ads from appearing.

Critical notifications include links to the page where you can take action to address the problem.

Note: Critical alerts appear both in the notifications list in the bell and as a red bar across the top of your browser window (see below).

Warning (yellow triangle icon)

Important account or campaign level issues—for example, account link requests, low funds or budgets, or performance problems.

Warning notifications include links to help you address or review the problem, or to open a help article related to the alert.

Recommendation (teal light bulb icon)

Opportunities or suggestions to improve campaign performance—for example, ways to better manage budgets or add more keywords.

Recommendation notifications include links to pages where you can implement suggested actions or learn more.

Informational (blue information icon)

Items of note that don't require immediate attention—for example, new feature alerts, received payments notices, or link request results.

Informational notifications may include links to related pages where you can learn more.

Understanding red bar alerts

Critical notifications in Microsoft Advertising appear as critical red bar alerts across the top of your browser window. These notifications also appear as critical notifications at the top of your notification list.

Critical alerts are urgent or important issues, usually related to billing, payment, or insertion order problems that might keep your ads from appearing. These alerts need to be resolved as quickly as possible.

You can dismiss a critical notification from the list, but you can’t dismiss a red bar alert—these continue to appear until the issue is resolved. The red bar alert always includes a link or button that allows you to take immediate action on the critical issue. Multiple critical alerts about the same account will appear in a single bar—just select the bar to see all the alerts.

Note

Only critical notifications appear as red bar alerts across the top of your browser window–all other notification types, such as warnings, recommendations, or information, appear only under the notifications bell or in the Notifications table.

View alerts from the notifications bell expando image
A red dot on the notifications bell at the top of every page in Microsoft Advertising lets you know if there are new notifications and triggers a preview bar for the first message. Select the bell or preview bar to show the full list of new notifications. You can choose to take immediate action or learn more about an issue by selecting links in the notification.
Manage alerts in the Notifications table expando image

The Notifications table, on the Notifications tab on the Account Summary page, provides an expanded view of the list where you can sort, filter, and search to see and prioritize the actions you need to take on your accounts.

Select the column headers to sort by account, notification category, notification type, or severity. The Action column provides resolution options or information.

Filter the table to focus in on the issues you want to address first.

  1. At the top of the table, select Add filter.
  2. Select the column you want to filter and refine the filter criteria.
  3. Give your filter a name if you expect to use this same filter combination frequently.
  4. Select Apply.
  5. To narrow the filter further, select Add filter and select more options from the list boxes provided.
  6. Select Apply to filter the table.
  7. To change how the table is filtered, select Edit at the top of the table, or select Reset to clear all filtering.
Note

Customers with 1 account or with more than 2,000 accounts will not see the Accounts Summary page.

Access the Notification table from the notifications bell expando image

The Notifications table, on the Notifications tab on the Account Summary page, provides an expanded view of the list where you can sort, filter, and search to see and prioritize the actions you need to take on your accounts.

You can also access the Notifications table from the notifications bell:

  • When you've selected the notifications bell from the Accounts Summary page, select View all to see all notifications across all accounts you have access to.
  • When you've selected the notifications bell while working in a single account, select View all to see the table pre-filtered to show only notifications relevant to that account.
  • When a notification type in the list affects multiple accounts, select View to see the table pre-filtered to show only that notification type, in all the accounts it impacts.

Select the column headers to sort by account, notification category, notification type, or severity. The Action column provides resolution options or information.

Things to keep in mind

Notes
  • When you select the notifications bell, you'll see notifications only for the specific account you’re working in. If you switch to another account, the list updates accordingly.
  • If a notification type applies to more than one account, they’re combined into one notification that indicates how many accounts are affected.
  • You can dismiss all or individual notifications from your list. Notifications are automatically dismissed if the issue is resolved, a newer notification is issued on the same subject, or the alert has expired.
  • Dismissing a notification from your notifications list doesn’t remove it from the lists of other people who have access to that account.
  • Closing the preview bar will dismiss it until the next time you log in to Microsoft Advertising.

See more videos...