Getting ad campaigns up and running in Microsoft Advertising
Getting ad campaigns up and running in Microsoft Advertising
From creating your first campaign to tips for optimization, here is a flow of steps you should follow to help create and maintain a robust, successful campaign.
Having an active and high-performing campaign takes more than just clicking the Create campaign button. This article goes through the series of steps you should take to ensure you're getting the most out of Microsoft Advertising.
Create a campaign
The first thing to do is to create a campaign. Microsoft Advertising has a number of campaign types to meet your advertising needs.
Campaign types
Audience campaigns: Audience campaigns show compelling ads to your ideal audience in placements across the web—all powered by Microsoft AI. Microsoft Audience Ads can appear on sites like MSN, Microsoft Start, Microsoft Edge, Outlook.com, and publisher partners based on our unique knowledge about your potential customers. For more information, see What are Audience campaigns? and How do I create an Audience campaign?
Lodging campaigns: Lodging campaigns help you manage manages your Hotel Price ads (HPA) and Property Promotion ads (PPA). While Hotel Price ads (HPA) are a hotel search experience designed to showcase your real-time room rates to potential customers, Property Promotion ads (PPA) are designed to inspire travelers who are looking for hotels or vacation rentals early in the planning process, when you can influence their decision.
Performance Max campaigns: Performance Max is an asset-focused campaign type that allows you to easily create and manage your campaigns, optimize ads to reach the right audience at the right time, and drive performance to meet advertising goals—across the entire Microsoft Advertising Network. For more information, see About Performance Max campaigns and Create a Performance Max campaign
Search campaigns: Search campaigns show your ads to potential customers searching for your products and services. Microsoft Search Ads are delivered at the right time using keyword matching, ensuring that your ads are optimally matched with potential customers' search queries. Microsoft Search Ads can appear with search results on sites like Microsoft Bing, AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and other partners. They may also appear on relevant sites to help you engage your ideal audience and achieve your advertising goals. For more information, see What are Search ads? and How do I create a Search campaign?
From the navigation menu on the left, select Create.
Choose a campaign goal from the list (Drive conversions, Generate leads, Build brand awareness, Sell products, or Promote apps) or select Skip if you already know which campaign type you want to use.
Follow the campaign creation workflow and choose the type of campaign you want to create: Search, Shopping, Premium Streaming, Lodging, Performance Max, or Audience.
Continue following the campaign creation workflow to select campaign settings, set up ad groups/asset groups, create ads and ad extensions (if applicable), and set a budget, bid strategy, and bids.
Once you have completed the campaign creation workflow, select Save & go live to enable your new campaign.
Did you create enough ad groups?
Ad groups, comprising tightly related ads, are the core component in organizing your campaign. When you created your campaign, did you create an ad group for each facet of your campaign goal? If not, create some more ad groups and ads. Learn more about organizing your account and campaigns
Confirm that you're enabled
Now that your campaign is all set up, you need to make sure everything else in your account is in working order so your ads will start to display. Have you entered a payment method? Also, make sure to check that the status of your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords is Enabled and that delivery is listed as Eligible. Here are a few articles to help you with this step:
Your campaign is now up and running. You could stop here, but please don't. PPC advertising is not a "set and forget" activity. Your campaign needs constant care and feeding. It's very important that you regularly monitor your campaign and make adjustments as necessary to improve its performance. A couple of things you can do right away is research more keywords, enter some good negative keywords, target your ad groups, and improve your ads with dynamic text. And don't forget to regularly use the many powerful reports that Microsoft Advertising offers.