A lot has been happening with Microsoft Advertising in January, so we thought it would be a good idea to give you a summary of the key updates.
- Microsoft Audience Network Expansion
- Audience Expansion
- Customer Match
- Shopping Updates
Microsoft Audience Network has expansion
Microsoft Audience Ads are currently available to customers in 25 different countries, including the USA, UK and France.
The major update here is that marketers can now use Audience Ads in French Canada. In order to stay connected with all your Candian customers, be sure to create your ads in both French and English.

What is the Microsoft Audience Network?
So essentially it’s premium native placements across Microsoft Publisher Partners. This gives brand safe experiences, highly contextual placements and generally, you see quite a strong industry ad performance.
The Microsoft Audience Network uses a lot of Microsoft first-party data from different sources that you can see in the diagram below.

Audience Expansion
Similar Audiences are available for Open Beta use
Microsoft Advertising announced the rollout of Similar Audiences in their June 2021 product roundup, and have now confirmed that they are available for use as an open beta.
They are available in the following markets: UK, AU, IN, NZ, ID, MY, PH, SG, TH and VN.
Similar Audiences are an easy and effective way to engage with qualified prospective customers who are similar to those in remarketing lists.
In-Marketing Audiences have expanded into Latin American markets
Microsoft Advertising has also announced that you can use In-Market Audiences within Latin American markets.
They have started small (only making 119 in-market audiences available) but will be looking to grow the portfolio of in-market audiences available in the future.
Examples of audiences available include:
- Games
- Autos & Vehicles
- Real Estate
Customer Match
There are no minimum requirements to using Customer Match moving forward
As of last month, users are no longer required to spend a minimum amount of money before they’re eligible to use Customer Match targeting (email match).
As we move into a cookieless world, Microsoft has realised that this needs to be widely available to all marketers and therefore dropped restrictions.
With Customer Match, you can use the email addresses your customers have shared to re-engage with them across the Microsoft Search Network and Microsoft Audience Network.
It’s available in all markets except the European Union, United Kingdom, and China.
Shopping Updates
Shopping campaigns have new reporting features within the Products tab. Performance and Conversion metrics are now available for reporting at the product level within Microsoft Advertising. Allowing users to access metrics such as Spend, Clicks, Conversions, Return on Ad Spend etc.
Microsoft has also confirmed that they improved functionality on the grid of the products tab itself.
These updates should all be rolled out throughout the course of January!

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