Microsoft Advertiser gets automatic updates for shopping campaigns, auto-generated remarketing lists and more

Microsoft announced a bunch of new features and other news for Microsoft’s advertising platform. These include automatic updates for shopping campaigns, automatically generated remarketing lists, more eligible UET tags migrating to the Microsoft Clarity insights experience, customer matching expanded to new markets, and more.

The big news is the new automatic updates for Shopping campaigns, which will have these two new features automatically enabled by July 10th.

(1) Automatic Item Update allows your website content to be searched to collect price and availability data (in stock, out of stock) for product listings that you upload through Merchant Center. If Microsoft detects a price mismatch or availability issue (a product is out of stock) between what you have listed in the product feed and what you have on your website, Microsoft will automatically update your product information to provide your customers with the best experience.

If you choose not to use the automatic item update service, you can opt out through the Merchant Center user interface by navigating to the Automatic Updates tab in your settings.

(2) Automatic coupons through Merchant Promotions, where you can promote products directly from your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns inventory with special offer tags. These tags appear at the bottom of your product ad as “special offer” links, helping to increase customer engagement. To make your latest coupon offers more visible to your customers, Microsoft will automatically create trade promotions for your Microsoft shopping campaigns using crawled data directly from your website. This data is entered every 12 hours to ensure that we only show your latest promotions. Automatic coupons will only apply to store-wide promotions and not to individual products.

You can opt-out of automatic merchant promotions through the Merchant Center UI by navigating to the Automatic Updates tab in the Settings section and selecting Block data by content.

Auto-generated remarketing lists are also now available in all Microsoft Advertising markets. If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to start remarketing, or if you’re already using remarketing and want to optimize performance, this is a great feature for you. These lists are remarketing lists that are automatically created for you and are designed to help you re-engage users in an even faster and easier way – and increase efficiency, Microsoft said.

There are three types of auto-generated remarketing lists. You can use one, two, or all three lists along with your existing remarketing and audience targeting lists.

• List of all visitors. List of users who have visited your site in the last 30 days (UET required).
• List of all converters. List of users who have converted in the last 180 days (requires UET and active conversion goals).
• Smart Remarketing List. The list of users likely to convert is based on our audience intelligence and is designed to provide a higher conversion rate (requires UET and active conversion goals).

To access these new remarketing lists, navigate to Tools > Shared Library > Audiences. You will also see a popup letting you know that you have new remarketing lists to use.

More relevant UET tags are being migrated to the Microsoft Clarity insights experience. Microsoft will soon make the experience more suitable for UET tags. Microsoft said the second phase of the Clarity migration will begin the week of July 11. If you were selected for this migration, you received an email from Microsoft advertising informing you of the change and the option to opt out early.

Customer matching has expanded to new markets including Monaco, Andorra, Holy See (Vatican City), San Marino, South Africa, Turkey, Serbia, Iceland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Republic of North Macedonia and Montenegro.

And there is even more news here.

Forum discussion at Twitter.