Conversion measurement improvements within Microsoft Ads
Microsoft has added 2 new features related to conversion reporting for its ad platform:
- Inclusion of conversions
- Post-print conversions
With these dimensions, the ad platform tries to help its advertisers determine which channels contribute the best to their marketing efforts, in obtaining leads and sales. In the same way, these functions allow to take into account multiple types of conversions to be used in bidding strategies.
Inclusion of conversions
Many companies no longer focus on a single metric, such as the quality of their site traffic or the targeting of their audience, to determine the success of a conversion. On the contrary, they configure small events or micro conversions, which allows them to better understand the consumer journey within a sales funnel.
These small events in a long sales cycle can mean downloading a document or attending a webinar, such as pre-sale processes. This is how this type of additional conversions can be configured within the automated system of the Microsoft ad platform, for bid strategies.
Subscriptions to a webinar or a PDF download can be frequent events or conversions within a long sales cycle. For this reason, the Microsoft system has added these actions as additional conversion types, which allow you to better optimize the ad platform.
Advertisers can also choose to track additional conversions, without including them in total conversion metrics or automatic bidding.
These metrics can be displayed by themselves, or if the advertiser wants to include them in certain instances, they can choose columns of metrics that specify "All conversions".
Post-print conversions
The ad platform allows you to track post-impression conversions of those users who saw the ads within the Microsoft network of sites, but did not click. This allows advertisers to have a better understanding of how Microsoft's network of sites provides valuable impressions, which contribute to eventual conversions.
To add this function, it will be necessary to enable it within the new "post-print conversion window", located within the "conversion objectives" area, which you will find by clicking on the objective you wish to incorporate.
The post impression conversions window allows you to define the time during which you want to measure conversions, since a user sees an ad. This number can vary depending on the type of sales cycle of your business and your personal brands, regarding how quickly your ads should generate an action on the user. However, the platform will apply one day, as the period of time to apply by default.
In this way, if you set a 7-day window for users who see an ad but do not click and then buy from your site through another channel, the platform will qualify it as a post impression conversion.
Users who click on an ad and then return to the advertiser's website through Microsoft's search engine to make a purchase will not be measured in post-impression conversions. This prevents this metric from being counted twice.
You must bear in mind that the platform will only show the historical records of post-impression conversions from the moment this function is launched.
These functionalities of the Microsoft ad platform are very important, whether you work with different advertisers or with your own startup, because a fundamental part of measuring your campaigns is knowing which action to attribute a conversion to. That is why I recommend that you take advantage of these new dimensions, so that you can obtain better information from your campaigns.
