How to Turn Off Audience Ads?

*** UPDATED: June 8, 2023 ***

Hello Greg,

Thank you once again for using our Microsoft Advertising Community Forum in 2022! Since a lot of updates have taken place since the time you submitted your query, we would like to include the latest updates regarding Audience Ads and the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN). We hope the extended response below will be of use to you and other customers:

Microsoft Audience Ads is a performance marketing solution for advertisers who want to connect with their ideal audience and drive return on investment (ROI). This feature enables advertisers to serve highly relevant ads to an audience who is ready to convert. Microsoft Audience Ads experiences—such as ads placed within articles—are engaging for users, integrate naturally into page content, and deliver visually rich ads for advertisers. Audience Ads are easy to set up, maintain, and optimize because they are fully integrated with existing Microsoft Advertising workflows. Search ads are automatically eligible to be transformed into Audience Ads, and advertisers are able to set up standalone audience campaigns as well.

Microsoft Audience Ads appear on the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN). These ad placements are cross-device and include premium sites like MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Edge, and other partners (with more to come). Clicks on these ads will take users to the landing page you specified when you created your ads. Microsoft Audience Ads are unique because they're targeted to users based on our understanding of their interests. We use consumer intent signals, which include search history, browse history, page content, and demographic information. These signals, combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, provide highly relevant content to users and determine which ads to display.

The Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) aims to provide an alternative to traditional search marketing campaigns by offering advertisers the ability to target people through things such as Audience Ads, In-market Audience lists, or Custom Audiences. For learning more about the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN) please see the following links:

• Microsoft Audience Network
• About audience marketing and the Microsoft Audience Network

To simply put it, the audience network does not require keywords to trigger ads. It is based on audience signals to determine when an ad should appear. Audience signals are unique attributes such as age, gender, LinkedIn information, remarketing data, etc. Audience network ads do not appear on the search engine results pages. Instead, they appear on native placements such as MSN, Outlook, Edge, and search partners. These are known as Audience Ads. The best practices for creating audience ads are summed up on the blog below:

• Top 5 native advertising creative ideas

Creating a new campaign to run audience ads on the Microsoft Audience Network is similar to creating a new search ad campaign.

1. From the collapsible menu on the left, select All campaigns > Campaigns > Create campaign.
2. Choose the appropriate goal for the campaign. Setting your goal right at the start lets us suggest the most helpful features for your campaign. You'll still have access to all Microsoft Advertising features regardless of the goal you choose.
3. Select Audience ads > Next.
4. The campaign creation wizard will then walk you through the process.

On the help page below you can see detailed steps pertaining to “Campaign settings”, “Ad groups, audiences & targets”, “Ads”, and lastly “Budget & bids”. One of the main things to keep in mind is that after you select Save on the fourth step (“Budget & bids”), your ads will begin appearing on the Microsoft Audience Network shortly afterwards if no errors are encountered on the account. In order to further optimize your audience campaigns, it is recommended to use the Audience Network Planner to experiment with different audiences and combinations of audiences.

• How do I create an audience campaign?

Regular search campaigns are also automatically enabled to serve on the Microsoft Audience Network (MSAN). With increasing pressure to do more with less, savvy marketers can tap into the power of search intent and use it to enhance overall performance across channels. Fueled by the rich intent data from search, the Microsoft Audience Network provides an effective way for you to connect to your potential customers with intent and reach them across the web. With powerful signals—which include search and web activity—you can deliver highly relevant messages to an audience who is ready to convert. When you come to Microsoft Advertising, you can leverage both the Microsoft Search Network and the Microsoft Audience Network. Together, these two networks reach more than a billion people delivering strong return on investment (ROI) through artificial intelligence (AI) and rich first-party data. Now, we’re making it even easier for you to find your best customers wherever they are and meet them in the moments that matter. To learn more about success factors, please check out the blog post below:

• Maximizing the power of search intent with Microsoft Advertising

Audience delivery through search coupled with effective Audience campaigns can boost your ads online. Our engineering teams are constantly monitoring our traffic quality metrics and are committed to the following promises:

• Better performance: Autobidding optimizes performance to the campaign goal respectively, for both search and audience networks. This is a major change, as we optimized in aggregate towards the campaign goal before – but now performance is maximized in both the search and audience network individually by slice.
• Comparable CPA and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): Campaign CPA and ROAS will be comparable between search and audience. Some variations may exist due to various factors but there will be no more egregious gaps.
• Traffic stability: We continually make improvements to reduce spikes or volatility.

You are encouraged to monitor your delivery to the audience network by running website URL reports frequently, to see how you have been performing on websites within the audience network. Running a Website URL (publisher) report shows the impressions, clicks, spend, and conversions for websites on the Microsoft Search Network and the Microsoft Audience Network. This data can be sorted by website URL, account, campaign, and ad group. You can run this report in order to see which website URLs are or aren’t performing well enough for your campaign or ad group target settings. For example, if ad impressions at those URLs yield a low click-through-rate, then you might decide to exclude those websites from your campaign.

We recommend running your ads on the Audience Network for some time in order to see how your overall performance is trending.  If you find, after optimizing your campaigns, that you are still unable to obtain your desired performance, the following steps can be taken to minimise delivery to the Audience Network:

Opting out of Microsoft Owned & Operated (O&O) sites

1. Go to Settings.
2. Go to the Exclusions section.
3. Enter msn.com, outlook.live.com, outlook.com, and bing.com.
4. Select Save.

Opting out of Premium Publishers

1. Run a Website URLReport to identify the sites they don't want to show on.
2. Go to Settings.
3. Go to Exclusions.
4. Enter the websites which they wish to exclude.
5. Select Save.

• Note: To block all traffic from a specific domain, leave off the “www.” prefix. For example, use “contoso.com” if you want to block traffic from www.contoso.com and www2.contoso.com.
• Note: Websites included in the Microsoft sites and select Traffic category cannot be manually excluded for delivery.

Opting out of the Search Partner Network

1. Navigate to the Ad-Group level and go toSettings.
2. Go to Other Settings>Ad Distribution.
3. Choose Microsoft sites and select traffic.

If you want to exclude your search ads from all audience network components, you will need to update your ad distribution settings to target only Microsoft Sites and Select Traffic. Please follow the steps above to opt out of our O&O sites and partners.

• Note: You should periodically monitor your Publisher URL reporting, because new domains may be added to the audience network offering as we continue to grow in the future, and these will not be immediately captured through exclusion settings.

For more detailed website/URL exclusion steps, please refer to the help pages below:

• How to prevent your ads from showing to certain people
• Share website exclusion lists across accounts

Our support teams are happy to discuss your account in more detail via phone, chat or email to provide review assistance, please see our support page to reach out! 

I hope the information provided here was of some use to you in answering your query. If you have any additional questions please do not hesitate to reach out to our support. I have also sent you a private message asking for further details regarding your query. You are more than welcome to respond to me so that I can begin the investigation on my end. I will be happy to help when possible.

Kind regards, 

Vahid | Microsoft Advertising Support Specialist | 800-518-5689