Microsoft Audience Network Planner

Key Takeaways

you may already know who your targeting audience is if you've been running microsoft audience ads but if you're looking to expand your reach or just want to get a better understanding of who your target audience is the microsoft audience network planner can be very beneficial think about it as microsoft's version of the google display planner but the big difference is that this tool from microsoft is still around and is actually useful so we're going to hop in to the audience network planner to show you how you can better research who your target audience may actually be to find the microsoft audience network planner we need to head up to tools and then under planning select audience network planner initially the planner will have all targeting options enabled and you will see the initial stats for if you were targeting everything on the microsoft ads audience network so we see in the left-hand navigation it defaulted me to target both the united states and in canada and i'm currently in the united states we have all ages all genders i'm not narrowing down on specific audiences companies industries we're going to get to that soon so this is everything and then if we're looking at the main portion of the screen in the middle we can see the following right here we have the estimated monthly audience then the estimated monthly impressions the graphs that they're showing us right now are defaulted to demographics right here so we're seeing estimated audience graphs for the age and gender i can switch over to location then i can review interest and there we see interests are broken down by the top in market audiences for who i'm currently targeting and then last we have device and here you'll be able to review your current estimated audience by desktop smartphone or tablet devices now it's pulling these volume numbers by the daily budget that you see over to the right hand side i don't know where this number is coming from but microsoft defaulted my budget to a little bit over 8 100 and they first set me up with a bid that's a dollar and 51 cents underneath the bid we then see monthly estimates so if i go to the daily budget and change the number let me go and change the bid too we can click get estimates at any time and then we'll see how those numbers change and you can do this at any point as you're updating the target persona so that's just an initial view of what you get when you first land on this page but you probably don't want to target everything on the audience network and luckily you don't have to because if we go back to the left hand side the initial filters that i just talked about can be adjusted and now we can look at how we can focus on a very specific set of users that you may want to target with campaigns using microsoft audience ads and to properly set up an audience ads campaign you can watch a video that we previously recorded and that one dives a little bit deeper into the targeting options you have as well as the ad formats and things you can do to make sure that you're prepped before launching a campaign first i'm going to go and change my location if i wanted to target the entire world i guess i could do that but most likely you're going to want to choose specific locations maybe i just want to stick with the country that i currently am in so i can get rid of canada we'll see canada disappeared off the highlighted map or i can start looking for specific locations we already know we can do country we already know we can do the entire world but i could type in a specific state or province depending on what country you're targeting click enter i can choose to target specific states in my case or for whatever reason if i wanted to target the entire united states i could still do that but just exclude any particular state city zip code you can even get down to the coordinate level i'm going to remove the country just to get a little specific now let's pretend i just want to target this particular state if i click save we notice how the monthly estimates at the top of the bar graphs changed as well as the monthly estimates over to the right hand side now it's going to help me better forecast that target audience and again as you go back to these different bar graphs you can see how much the demographics have changed if they have it all all these are broken out by percentages not necessarily the amount of people so you may not see big differences but it's all depending on what targeting options that you're changing we can then look at potentially getting more specific with our age ranges and these are the same grouped age ranges that we could target within our other microsoft ads campaigns maybe instead of all ages i only want to target a younger age range if we click save we can see the difference in what changes here my monthly estimates keep going down let's filter even further with genders we're going to default to all genders but you can target just females just males but for this example i'll just choose one gender next you can layer on specific audiences you can narrow down just to your remarketing list so if people visited specific pages of your website you can add that to the mix as well if you are running microsoft ads shopping campaigns you may have dynamic remarketing lists already set up if they've interacted with specific products potentially bought certain products already you can create different remarketing lists from those and then if you choose you can layer those audience options into your targeting too next you can choose to add custom audiences and if you're not familiar with these with microsoft you're using first party data from your data management platform and then you can create specific audiences from purchase history maybe the type of subscriptions that they have lifetime value customer referral information a variety of options there i'm going to skip down and go to combined lists this is a similar feature of combined lists that they have within google ads as well we do have another video on how to do combined lists that you can check out right here but for this video i'm going to use in-market audiences as you can see there are 743 in-market audiences available within microsoft ads so most likely you're going to want to search for specific audiences you may want to target i just looked at development this one looks like it has a decent list size 23 million so i can maybe add that to the mix if we click save we know we're going to see our audience estimates update and now let's check in on our graphs again as you can see in our demographic ones we're 100 18 to 24 with our age range we're 100 female for our gender if i go up to interest the top in market audiences have definitely changed now that i've focused on one particular end market audience that i was initially looking at this could be helpful because this may give me new ideas of other in-market audiences i may want to test people who are in the web design and development in market audience are falling under financial planning audiences computers and peripheral audiences we see software telecom so some of these are fairly similar i could choose to add these to my mix and just see how my audience changes or i can just make note of these and potentially go back later if i'm running out of new ideas of how i may want to expand my campaigns as you can see this could be helpful if even if you're not planning to run any audience ads you're at least getting some idea of who this target audience is on the microsoft audience network so we just went over audiences that we'd want to target just keep in mind you do have the option to exclude those audiences too and we can see in the drop down it's the same list of options that we have now the next three targeting options kind of go together and that is because these options are available ever since we've had linkedin information and linkedin targeting options available in microsoft ads so we can look at targeting people who potentially work at specific companies if they're in specific industries and if they have certain job functions you can layer these audiences into your search campaigns but as of right now you can only do this at a observation or bid only level that means you're just collecting information and potentially making bid adjustments if you do decide to run audience ads you can use these linkedin audiences as a targeting level actually focusing specifically on these and you can plan ahead using this network planner so the first linkedin targeting option is going to be company i've been to the twin cities a bunch of times so i know 3m is in minnesota and that was the state i was targeting my location targeting so maybe i wanted to target people who worked at 3m and i know there are many other wonderful big companies in minnesota these are the three that pop in my head right away so if i want to target people in my desired audience and demographics only within these companies i can try to do this if i click save look how much that audience size goes down i've pretty much killed my audience size i've killed my impressions they're estimating i'm not going to get any clicks so while this may be a crazy precise campaign i'm pretty much not going to show anything and it's going to be a waste of my time so that's why it is helpful for me to review this so i can go back in and potentially remove these audiences remove all click save and now we're back to where we were so just like how you can search for companies maybe you want to exclude some if you're trying to do some conquesting you know where your competitors are and if your competitors are showing up as an option you can exclude them so potentially they won't see your ads and you're just targeting other companies around them that's one fun strategy i like to use okay so we found out that company targeting is very specific i know i'm targeting a smaller region so that may work for you if you're doing a larger country set or just larger geographical areas in general but i'm not going to change my minnesota state i want to leave that location targeting pretty precise so instead of company targeting i could potentially look at specific industries i can search or just peruse the variety of industries these users may work in i'm just going to select a few of these click save and now my audience size went down again i'm getting a little bit more impressions but still not really worth my time so once again i'm going to remove these options and maybe consider the last option which is job function the last of the three from the linkedin targeting options that we have within microsoft and this one narrowed the reach again so potentially i'm just getting too specific or i may want to consider which part of this persona is more valuable to me i picked a fairly specific in-market audience of web design and development but maybe people with just the job function is a more important audience to me i may consider going up to my in-market audience and just like the other ones i can always remove any of these targeting options as well kind of backed myself into a corner here by choosing just a specific region but hopefully you're seeing how you can change a variety of aspects of this particular persona to see what type of performance you can get if i look at my estimated performance over here we can see i'm probably being flagged for having a low bid estimate they're suggesting a dollar and fifty cents i'll make them happy let's bump this up to five dollars my impressions went up my clicks went up and my average cpc is pretty good compared to what i would actually set as my bid one thing i would also look at is the estimated spend that's pretty low but i set it as a but i set my daily budget at a thousand dollars if i definitely have a budget that big for every month again that was a daily budget of a thousand dollars not a monthly budget so i have a ton of budget to use this could give me information of maybe i do have the opportunity to test new targeting options that would normally not consider testing maybe i can add more targeted audiences maybe i can remove specific target audiences to make my monthly audience estimates larger well now you don't have to guess if you want to use microsoft audience ads now you can kind of see what those ranges could be and no matter who that persona is that you're trying to target you have the location age audience gender you filtered in on any of the specific job information that we can get because of the linkedin targeting if you're happy with everything you can go to apply to my account and you'll have the option to add this persona to a new audience ads campaign or if you already have an audience ad campaign established you can just create a new ad group using this targeting persona this is a brand new account that we created so i would have to create a new one from here i entered in my name because that was missing already we have the thousand dollar day daily budget because i set that within my estimate dropping down again there was the five dollar bid that i just changed it to add in your ad group name and then you could save it so if i go back to my campaigns there we see my audience ads campaign is set up there's my ad group which is paused because i don't have any ads so then you can just go back in create your ads you can get all the information on how to do that in the audience ads video that i shared before and then start getting your campaign going so you can build awareness on microsoft's native ad platform and have a good understanding of what type of estimates cost and traffic you're gonna get so have fun playing around with the tool it's kind of fun to see who you can get in front of especially that we have those linkedin targeting options that we really can't get in any other platform to do this type of native advertising if you've seen success with audience ads before or you have any questions on how you may want to use the audience network planner let us know in the comments below thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe