• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 3, 2021

Microsoft is adding a Target Impression Share option to its suite of automated bidding strategies.

The feature, announced Tuesday, supports automatic bidding. Marketers set the budget, where the ads should appear, and the target impression share.

“You set your budget, where you want your ads to appear, and your Target Impression Share, and Microsoft Advertising automatically sets your bids,” Kevin Salat, Microsoft Advertising product marketing manager, wrote in a post.

Target Impression Share, which allows marketers to position the ad on the page, joins other features including Manual, Enhanced CPC, Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions, Target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Target Return On As Spend (ROAS).

Visibility and awareness, competitive advantage, and creating more volume are some of the reasons to use Target Impression Share, according to Salat.

He suggests these best practices:

• Beginning with low-risk campaigns setting an impression share to target based on historical performance at first, allowing at least two weeks for Microsoft AI to learn and then evaluate performance after the learning period over the next two-to-three weeks.
• Use experiments (available for Search campaigns only). This is recommended over any pre-post comparison. Run the experiment in A/A mode (i.e., same setup in both campaigns) for one-to-two weeks before testing the strategy.
• Don’t set a maximum CPC cap, because if it’s set too low it will greatly limit the performance.
• Use Conversion Tracking  with the strategy, but it’s not required.

For Microsoft Advertising advertisers using Shopping Campaigns or other feed-based campaigns, the company in the next few weeks will release an option to track product purchases when new conversion goals are created.

Improved accuracy, greater consistency, and more optimization opportunities are some of the support that product conversion goals provides.