Understanding performance estimates and keyword suggestions

Learn about what factors into our performance estimates during campaign creation and what determines how keywords are suggested.

Which locations have performance estimates and keyword suggestions available?

Performance estimates and keyword suggestions are currently supported for English-language campaigns that are targeted to locations within in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. If your campaign is global, then the estimates and suggestions are based on only these locations.

What causes low estimated performance?

A number of factors may lead to low estimated performance, but here are some common cases:

Issue	Fix
Your budget is too low	Increase your campaign's budget.
Your bids are too low	Increase your bids. You bid against other advertisers using the same keyword, so in general, higher bids help get your ad to display in more desirable locations on the search results page.
You are targeting too narrowly	Check your targeting settings (where and to whom you want to show your ads). You may be excluding too many searches. Try removing or widening one or more targeting settings.
Your keywords have very little or no search history on the Microsoft Search Network	You may be using a long keyword with exact match or phrase match — try changing the match type to broad. Note: If you’re advertising a brand name or product, you can choose to do nothing and wait for traffic to increase.

Note

Experiment with the fixes: Try one or more of the above fixes and see what happens to your estimated performance.

For more information on bidding, see Did I bid high enough?