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Adzooma vs Microsoft Advertising: What’s The Difference?

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Danielle Strouther

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18 MIN

Adzooma vs Microsoft Advertising: What’s The Difference?

Microsoft Advertising is one of the most powerful advertising platforms in the world. 

It offers: 

  • One of the cheapest Cost Per Click prices, with CPC 32.5% to 60.2% less than Google Ads. 
  • Reaches 63 million users that Google doesn’t. 
  • 75% of Bing users aged 35 and over; 50% of them have an income of over $75,000. 
  • Incredible targeting options, including LinkedIn profile targeting, advanced device targeting and more. 

We’re big Microsoft advocates at Adzooma. In fact, if you’re new to Microsoft, we’ll give you $125 of search advertising spend for free when you sign up with $25.

However, if you really want to get the best results from your Microsoft Advertising campaigns, you need Adzooma. As an all-in-one advertising management platform, Adzooma offers more features than Microsoft Advertising alone to save you time, achieve better results and scale your business. 

Find out how Adzooma compares to Microsoft Advertising and the best features you might be missing out here.

Recognised as one of Microsoft’s best partners 

Adzooma wouldn’t be able to provide this platform without Microsoft’s help. 

Working alongside their team, together we created a truly one of its kind platform to help advertisers grow and scale their Microsoft Advertising success like never before. 

It’s why we won the Rising Star Of The Year award at the 2021 Microsoft Advertising Partner awards. We don’t just work with Microsoft, but how we go above and beyond to ensure that our users get the best possible result from their campaigns. 
In the same awards, this success was also recognised through 3 other nominations

  • Account Team of the Year – Awarded to an exemplary account team or group that partners, engages, and drives Microsoft Advertising revenue growth and feature adoption throughout the year
  • Community Response Award – This new award category offers recognition to partner organisations or someone within a partner organisation that has provided innovative support or services to the industry or the community this year amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic
  • Trailblazer of the Year [Chief Technology Officer Thomas Hampson] – Awarded to an individual that, in an innovative and engaging way evangelises Microsoft Advertising and drives Microsoft Advertising brand awareness and affinity internally, as well as in the industry

Our continued partnership with Microsoft means that together, we’ll continue to update, innovate and grow the platform for you to reap the rewards.

More intuitive for better time saving

Adzooma offers the same functionality as Microsoft Advertising. And more. Plus, we make it easier, quicker and more intuitive to use. 

For example, instead of having separate screens for your campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads, Adzooma combines them all into one, single Management screen

All the key data you want to know, including impressions, clicks, conversions, cost, will be neatly displayed in your management table. If you want to get a closer look at your ad groups, keywords, or ads, just click the arrow to reach the right level. 

All of the metrics can be customised here, meaning that the data you want to see will always be displayed first. You can also customise the date range by clicking on the calendar icon at the top of the page.

Adzooma Management is more than just looking at your campaigns. It’s how you can make quick edits and adjustments without leaving the platform.

  • If you want to change a budget for a particular campaign or a keyword bid, you just have to click the edit icon and enter your new budget. 
  • If you want to make mass changes, just select the campaigns, ad groups, keywords or ads in question and click the ‘edit’ button at the top to make quick changes.
  • If you want to pause or enable campaigns, just click the status toggle.

What’s more, you can add new campaigns, ad groups, keywords, search adverts or Responsive Search Adverts (RSAs)  to your account without leaving the platform with our advanced campaign builder. 

Just click the ‘Add campaign’ button to create an entire new campaign, or hit the ‘+’ button to add more ad groups, keywords or adverts to an existing campaign. 

It’s simple to operate and has fewer steps than Microsoft’s campaign builder, which means less time spent on new campaigns and more time gained to apply optimisations and scale your business.

What’s more, you can automatically create ad groups based on keyword match types.

To do this, just select ‘Match type’ at the top of the ad group builder and enter your keywords into the field. When you’re ready, we’ll automatically separate them out into different ad groups based on keyword match type.

What’s more, you can automatically create ad groups based on keyword match types.

To do this, just select ‘Match type’ at the top of the ad group builder and enter your keywords into the field. When you’re ready, we’ll automatically separate them out into different ad groups based on keyword match type.

One-click optimisation Opportunities

Microsoft Advertising has a recommendation system that will send you suggestions to optimise and get more out of your campaigns. Instead of recommendations, Adzooma has Opportunities. Don’t worry, there are more differences than just the name. 

To see your Microsoft recommendations, you need to click the recommendations tab from the campaigns page. There you’ll see a list of your recommendations split into these four types: 

  • Ads and extensions, which include suggestions to add extensions to ads, try out different headline variations, or to use optimise ad rotation settings. 
  • Bidding and budgets, which mostly suggest automated bidding targets, but also offer some suggestions when to raise budgets to keep ads running on your busiest days. 
  • Keywords and targeting, which can identify poorly converting keywords or suggest other match types or negative keywords to add. 

Repairs, which aim to fix issues in your account such as making sure your campaigns are structured correctly, tracking is set up and enabled or any other certification issues you might have.

Most of the Microsoft Advertising recommendations are based around their own automated bidding strategies. At Adzooma, our suggestions are a little more intelligent than that. 

We offer 25 unique Opportunities for Microsoft Advertising, broken down into these key categories: 

  • Improve Performance, which includes unique suggestions to make bid adjustments based on device, gender or age or even fix spelling mistakes. 
  • Reduce Wasted Spend, which aims to increase your ROI with suggestions to stop targeting non-performing age ranges or genders, or decrease bids on your weak performers.  
  • Best Practice, which uses industry standard practices to ensure your campaigns are competitive, including suggestions to check low performing landing pages or fix broken links. 

Occasionally, we’ll also have a special partner deal for you in there too, like claiming cashback on all your Microsoft Advertising spend with Revolut.

Each Opportunity will have two options: details or ignore. If you press details, you’ll be given a detailed explanation of why it’s important and how it can affect your account. If you want to apply it, click the ‘add to queue’ button. When you’re ready, hit ‘apply all’ Opportunities in the queue to action all these changes in a single click.

If you click ignore on an Opportunity, our platform will use this information to get smarter over time, making sure we only send you relevant Opportunities that you’ll want to action. 

We don’t just explain why we’ve generated this opportunity, we also give you estimated figures showing you how many impressions, clicks, conversions it could generate you, as well as how much money and time you’ve saved.

Automated rules every 30 minutes, not every day 

Automated rules are the PPC assistant you’ve always wanted. They’re there to provide around the clock optimisation, time-saving automatic actions and custom alerts of important changes. 

With rules, you can adjust budgets, pause poor-performing keywords or get custom alerts when it’s time to take action, saving you hours of manually monitoring the data. 

These are the instructions that Microsoft Advertising provide for setting up an automated rule: 

  1. From the main menu on the far left, click All campaigns.
  2. From the page menu, click either Ad groups, Ads and extensions, or Keywords.
  3. Click Automate.
  4. Select what you want to happen (for example, Pause campaigns when).
  5. Optional: Specify the circumstances that you want to trigger your action (for example, CPC > $5.00). You can set up to five such triggers for each rule.
  6. Specify how often you want the rule to run.
  7. Choose if you want an email sent to you when the rule is run.
  8. Optional: If you want to see a preview of what would happen if the rule were run immediately, click Preview results.
    For example, if you create a rule to automatically increase your budget based on CTR, you can use Preview results to see which budgets would change and by how much.
  9. Click Save.

We’ve made this simpler at Adzooma.

To create a rule, just click Automation at the top and the ‘New Automation Rule’ button. There, you can choose a template (which we’ll cover below) or create your own custom rule. All rules are created using 5 steps – with detailed explanations all the way through if you need it. 

Whatever rule you want to make, you can do it from this one, simple creator.

What’s more, our automated rules are more advanced than Microsofts as we offer: 

  • Rules that run every 30 minutes, not every day. This gives you greater control and enables you to make impactful changes at the right time to increase your success. 
  • And/Or conditions, which allow you to create intelligent rules that will run on multiple metrics, for example, if a campaign has more than 50 conversions OR if it has a CPA of less than £5. 
  • Select which teammates you want to be notified when a rule fires, without having to manually import their email address. 
  • As many conditions as you want, instead of a limit of 5.

Simply put, Adzooma’s automated rules are smarter, faster and more efficient, helping you save time and scale.

For more information on creating your own automated rules, you can follow our step by step guide on creating a custom ‘high volume, low conversion’ rule here.

Templated rules to get you started quickly 

Unlike Microsoft Advertising, Adzooma also offers an entire library of premade rules that you can apply to your account in a few clicks. 

Each rule was created by PPC experts as the go-to rules that have been proven to increase performance, save time and improve their ROI. It’s perfect for those that are new to automated rules or are just looking for a quick way to apply them to your account. 

To see our rules, head to Automation and click ‘New Automation Rule’. Then, select ‘Choose Templates’ to be taken to our library of 28 premade rules that you can apply to your account.

When you’ve found one you like, just click on it, choose what campaigns you want to apply it to, how often you want it to run and click save. You can make any edits and customisations to these rules as you want – they’re your starting point for you to make them your own.

Want to know more about our templates? Find out our five most popular automation rules and why they’re used here.

Intelligent reporting to prioritise your workload 

The key to great campaigns is data. 

That’s why Microsoft Advertising runs multiple reports for you to get a deeper look at your data to figure out what’s working, what isn’t and what needs your attention. 

For example, Microsoft offer reports such as:

  • The Keyword, Campaign, Ad and Ad group reports, which tell you which campaigns are performing well and how your keywords are contributing to campaign performance.
  • The Search term report, which shows which words customers enter into search to cause your ads to display.
  • The Share of voice report, which gives you an estimate on where you might be losing to competitors in the marketplace.

Once you’ve selected which report you want to run, there are a few extra steps you have to take. You’ll need to select the date range, which specific campaigns you want to run the report for and what metrics you want to appear in the columns before you can think about interpreting the results.

Adzooma does reporting differently. 

We offer 7 predefined reports to remove the hours of data analysis and number crunching, so you can prioritise your workload. 

Our flagship one is the PPC Performance Report. Analysing your Microsoft Advertising account, the PPC Performance report gives you an overall score out of 100 with a breakdown of how optimised your account is. The closer to 100 you are, the better optimised your ads are. 

Underneath the score, you’ll find cards showing you where you can improve and the actions you can take right now. To make things even easier, you can also click to action these changes inside Adzooma, taking you from reporting to optimisation in seconds. 

That means you’ll spend less time finding problems and more time fixing them.

Adzooma also offers customisable reports for complete freedom and control. ou can have as many pages, graphs, charts and data as you want. Add your own images and text and show off your success with clients or shareholders.

Whatever you need, just click it and Adzooma will add in the data. What’s more, every report will automatically update with the latest figures, giving you 100% accurate reports you can rely on.

Manage your Google and Facebook ads simultaneously 

Adzooma isn’t just for Microsoft Advertising. 

You can use it to manage your Google and Facebook accounts simultaneously, without having to use a separate platform. You can add as many accounts as you want and switch between them in seconds. 

When you log into Adzooma, you’ll be able to see top level data and PPC performance scores for your accounts, letting you prioritise which account needs your attention first. It’s your secret weapon to managing multiple accounts on the go. 

Want to know more?

Ready to transform your Google Ads management with Adzooma? 

Sign up for free today.

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