Microsoft Audience Network as a measured channel

The first thing we do on an audience network engagement is take audience ads out of your search campaigns. Microsoft lets a search campaign opt into native placements, which means search budget is being spent on MSN and Outlook inventory against creative nobody wrote, reported inside the same campaign row as your brand keywords. In the accounts we have inherited, that setting was on and unnoticed more often than not, and the conversation that follows is usually about where the last quarter's search money actually went. Separating the channel: Audience ads get their own campaigns, their own budgets and their own goals. Nothing else is defensible: a native placement and a bottom-of-funnel search click have different jobs, different latency and different worth, and averaging them produces a blended number that justifies whatever anyone already believed. Once separated, the channel can be judged, and sometimes the judgement is that it should be switched off. We have delivered that conclusion and refunded the remaining retainer rather than keep spending. Placements and what gets excluded: Inventory runs across MSN and Microsoft Start, Outlook.com, the Edge new tab and syndicated partner sites. The partner tail is where the money leaks. We build a website exclusion list from the first fortnight of placement data, then keep pruning until the list stops growing, which it does, usually within six weeks. Made-for-advertising domains and content-farm partners come out first. This is unglamorous work and it is most of the performance difference between a native channel that works and one that does not. Creative: Microsoft native units want a 1.91 to 1 image and a square, a short headline at 30 characters, a long headline at 90 and a description at 90. The long headline carries almost all of the weight in a feed placement and almost none in the new tab, so a single creative set optimised for one is wrong in the other. We write four sets against one offer and rotate them on evidence rather than on schedule. For a beauty catalogue we run product audiences off the Shopping feed instead, because the product image outperforms anything we would write. Measurement: View-through conversions are counted by default, and a native channel credited for views will always look like the best performer you have. We separate view-through out of the primary goal and report it as a distinct line with its own window, so the channel is compared on clicks against everything else and its view contribution is argued separately, on the record. If your board sees one blended ROAS figure that includes view-through native, someone is being misled, possibly including the person presenting it. Regulated categories: Microsoft's policies for gambling and crypto on audience inventory are narrower than on search, and vary by market. We confirm what is permitted per country before quoting. For a Norwegian or Finnish gambling account there is nothing to confirm and we will say that in the first call. Not included: Search campaign management, video, programmatic buying through a DSP, landing page work and creative production beyond ad copy and cropping supplied assets. We do not build the offer; we place it. Not for: Brands that want an awareness channel with no conversion goal attached, since without a goal there is nothing here we can be accountable for. Budgets under roughly 4,000 EUR a month on this channel specifically, where the placement data never accumulates fast enough to prune the tail. And advertisers who need the channel to be profitable inside its first month.