Microsoft Ads Optimization Score: How to Upgrade Your Search Ads

What is a Microsoft Ads Optimization Score?

The Microsoft Ads Optimization Score is a new Microsoft Advertising feature that evaluates an ads’ potential by reviewing keywords, targeting, bidding, budgets, and other ad elements. It then assigns that ad a score out of 100 and provides a list of recommendations for further optimization.

The sole purpose of this new feature is to assist Microsoft Advertising users in achieving peak campaign performance. 

If you’re an affiliate marketer who uses Microsoft Advertising (formerly Bing Ads) as an alternative search traffic source to Google Ads, this is a feature that’s worth examining.

Let’s look a little closer at how you can utilize it to optimize your ad campaigns.

Where do I check my Optimization Score?

Your ads’ Optimization Score is located underneath the Recommendations page on the platform’s left sidebar. At the top of this page you will see a blue horizontal bar that largely displays your overall score as a percentage. 

However, this feature would be pretty pointless if that’s all it did. How would you know what is attributing to your score and how you can improve? Luckily, this page will also help you determine if your targeting needs work, if your keywords are off, and other area where there’s room for improvement.

This is the real benefit of the Optimization Score.

How to Improve your Optimization Score

Unless you constructed a flawless ad campaign out of the gate, you’ll see a list of recommendations underneath your score. These are also categorized by different ad components such as repairs, ad extensions, and bidding & budgets.

Microsoft assigns a value to each recommendation so that you know which is likely to improve your score the most. This is quite useful for prioritizing which actions to take to improve your ad. 

You can choose to apply a recommendation if you agree with what it’s suggesting. Alternatively, you can also dismiss the action if you think you know what’s best. Doing either will increase your score by the displayed percentage for that specific recommendation. 

It’s likely that you will agree with most of the recommendations you receive from from the platform, and in that case it’s best to just apply them to your campaign. However, like with anything in affiliate marketing, testing is the only way to truly determine something’s effectiveness. Don’t be afraid to use a little intuition here as well.

It’s also important to keep in mind that a stellar Optimization Score on your Microsoft Ad doesn’t necessarily mean you have a great ad. It just means that your ad’s effectiveness isn’t being directly hindered by some of the choices you’ve made. 

This is a beneficial and welcomed feature to Microsoft’s ad platform. Just know that creating a high-converting search ad will still require you to get the fundamentals just right.