Adwise comes up with an innovative solution for Microsoft Publishers

Monday 21 March 2022 - Adwise Data

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Within Microsoft Ads, advertisers are sometimes faced with sudden peaks in their ad spend. The reason for this could be that Microsoft Advertising search partners suddenly catch large-scale clicks of poor quality. Many advertisers' budgets are thus unnecessarily spent on irrelevant traffic. Until recently, apart from manual exclusion from these placements, there was no way to tackle this problem. So far, because at Adwise we have developed an innovative script solution for this.

At customers where we use Microsoft Ads, we regularly see that unnecessarily high costs are incurred by ad placements with high volumes of poor-quality traffic at Microsoft search partners. This phenomenon is called advertising arbitration and is as debatable as it is difficult to solve.

Advertising arbitrage

To understand the problem properly, you first need to know how advertising arbitration works. When online advertising started to grow explosively, the so-called residual stock of advertisements grew just as fast. By means of cookies and algorithms, networks began to increase the quality of that stock. This resulted in the criticized advertising arbitration. There are ad networks, such as those Microsoft search partners, that negotiate with providers about the cost-effective procurement of placements. By then reselling these placements with considerable margins, they quickly make a profit, but the quality of traffic for advertisers drops significantly.

Harmful for advertisers

The objective for search partners is to ensure that a click yields more than a visitor has cost. The problem is that a search partner can decide to attract more or less traffic to their own platform, which causes those unexpected peaks in traffic through clicks on an advertisement.

Sudden spikes in traffic due to placements by Microsoft Publishers.

Microsoft has filters that are supposed to prevent excesses, but they don't catch everything. Apart from manually disabling search partners in Microsoft Ads, this was not previously a solution. Until now, because at Adwise we have written our own, unique exclusion script.

Our solution

In collaboration with our innovation team, we have developed an automated script that prevents sudden peaks in poor-quality traffic via automated exclusions from campaigns in Microsoft Ads.

Our tool is configuration-based. This means that it allows you to indicate what needs to be corrected. So you get control over where you want your ads to be shown, or rather: where you do not want them to be shown. You can set up these corrections based on various metrics and you can also provide insight into the data for each customer by means of a link to the data studio.

Equipment and costs for the set-up

With this tool, we ensure that our customers' advertising budgets are used much more cost-effectively within Microsoft Ads.In order to set up the tool, a number of configuration settings apply:
- Account ID (in the url as AID) this is a numeric identifier.
- CTR multiplier
- CPA multiplier
- Budget percentage
- Exclusions (which websites may run at any time. e.g.: duckduckgo.com)