Bing Ads gives advertisers machine learning-powered insights

Competition tab, performance insights and location recommendations highlight performance changes and competitive pressures, offering suggestions advertisers can take to improve results.

Bing Ads is rolling out the first set in a series of machine learning-powered insights advertisers will find in the web interface to help them analyze performance and take action more quickly in their accounts. Here’s how they break down.

Competition tab. As you can see above, Bing added a tab for auction insights and another for recommendations. The updated auction insights reporting includes trending charts of how the account has fared against the competition over time and detailed tables that can also show traffic segmented by time, device and filtered by competitor. The recommendations tab provides automated insights based on ads of the account and its competitors. And these go beyond “raise your budget” and “raise your bids” to insights based on how an account’s impression share changes during the day compared to its competitors, or how bid adjustments could help a campaign compete better on certain devices.

Performance insights. “We have begun applying machine learning to your campaigns to understand their typical performance characteristics so that when a change seems out of the ordinary, you’ll see a performance insight notification which you can click on to see our root cause analysis of why that spike or dip occurred,” said Bing Ads engineering lead Dare Obasanjo. These are indicated with a lightbulb icon within the performance charts on the campaign tab.

Clicking on the insights, advertisers will see information about what the anomaly was, what drove it and what they can do about it.

This feature will roll out slowly over the next few months as Bing Ads’ machine learning system processes all the campaigns to understand patterns.

Location targeting recommendations. These will appear wherever advertisers can manage location targets in Bing Ads. It will suggest locations that similar advertisers have had success targeting. This is the first iteration of insights and recommendations that Bing Ads will surface based on the best-performing advertisers that are similar to the advertiser. Location targeting recommendations will be based on the locations where the advertiser does business.