Microsoft Advertising auto-apply recommendations out of beta, advertisers opted in by default

Auto-apply recommendations in Microsoft Advertising are now out of beta and generally available, the company announced Monday. By default, advertisers are opted into all five of the platform’s recommendation types (more on that below).

Why we care. Microsoft Advertising first launched this feature in beta in March 2021 and now it’s widely available, which means it can potentially help more advertisers save time when creating ads or optimizing their campaigns.

While opting into auto-apply recommendations won’t increase your budgets, it’s still authorizing the platform to make changes on your behalf, without your involvement. Advertisers should assess whether that’s acceptable for them and opt out if it’s not.

Five types of recommendations. Microsoft Advertising currently offers the following auto-apply recommendation types:

• Create Expanded Text Ads.
• Create Responsive Search Ads.
• Create multimedia ads.
• Remove negative keywords conflicts.
• Fix conversion goal setting issue.

Advertisers are opted into all five recommendation types by default; opting in does not increase budgets.

View scheduled recommendations. Recommendations that will automatically apply are viewable in the “Scheduled to auto-apply” section of the Recommendations page.

The cards in this section provide a short description of the potential issue, the date the recommendation will be automatically applied, and advertisers can also view the recommendation from this card.

Email notifications can be enabled for recommendations by switching on the “Ad performance optimization” email preference for all account managers. Recommendations are automatically applied seven days after the email notification is sent.

Reference recommendation history. Advertisers have two ways to keep tabs on applied recommendations:

• The Change history page – Select “Recommendations auto apply” in the Change history page to show changes made by auto-apply recommendations within a given timeframe.
• The clock icon – Click on the clock icon that appears in the top-right corner of the Recommendations pages to view your applied recommendations history. Select the “Auto applied” tab to see the auto-apply history for the previous 30 days.

Opt out. Advertisers can opt out at any time by navigating to the auto-apply recommendation control center (the thunderbolt icon on the top-right side of the Recommendations page, shown below).

From there, uncheck each recommendation type that you don’t want to automatically apply. Note: These recommendations can still be manually applied in the future.

About The Author

George Nguyen is an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic and paid search. His background is in journalism and content marketing. Prior to entering the industry, he worked as a radio personality, writer, podcast host and public school teacher.