Skai Signal Enhancement Strengthens Microsoft Automated Bidding with Client-Side Data

Publisher automated bidding is becoming the gold standard for search marketing. By using the wide array of data collected through its entire ecosystem, a publisher can leverage powerful intelligence to optimize for ROI on behalf of its advertisers.

Applying the best signals for publisher automated bidding is key. Bid optimization requires rich data, and search engines can only optimize as far as the data can help them to navigate. Publishers need marketers to pass additional data that their conversion tags can’t track in order to drive maximum performance.

Now, a new integration between Skai and Microsoft Advertising offers the best of both worlds: rich, consumer-level information at the publisher level combined with unique client-side proprietary data.

Skai Signal Enhancement + Microsoft Automated Bidding 

Microsoft Automated Bidding uses machine learning and analysis of a broad range of signals at the auction level to select the bid that is most likely to achieve your desired volume of conversions or conversion value. Even though it is automated, it doesn’t mean that search marketers can’t do things on their side to improve results. By getting better client-side data to the publishers, the automated algorithms can be smarter about what matters to advertisers and optimize bids accordingly.

With Skai Search Signal Enhancement, advertisers can provide custom conversion data to enable Microsoft Automated Bidding to optimize towards the marketer’s “true north” data.

For example, Microsoft Advertising’s conversion tag can track which keywords and ads drove online leads for a university—but only the university’s back-end systems know which of those leads turned into what really matters to them which are funded enrollments. Without this information, the automated bidding can only optimize toward leads, but with that additional layer of data, the publisher can help the university automatically optimize its bids to increase funded enrollments.

Let’s say a customer sees your ad, clicks on it, but you want to know what happened next. Now, you can import client-side data to allow for better tracking and ROI analysis, giving publisher automated bidding a more comprehensive view of the impact of the ad.

“Some of the signals used by Microsoft Automated Bidding to optimize search campaigns are the search query, match type, and ad copy, along with characteristics including a user’s location, device type, operating system, web browser, time of day and day of week,” says Skai Product Manager, Mark Sherman. “By using Signal Enhancement, Skai clients can enrich this optimization with additional data that can’t get to Microsoft due to limitations in tracking.”

While it’s highly recommended to implement Microsoft’s Universal Event Tracking (UET) to maximize performance, even brands not using the UET tag can utilize existing data to leverage Microsoft Advertising’s auction-time bidding.

Signal Enhancement is just one example of Skai’s Total Search Intelligence philosophy

For the last 14 years, Skai Search has been a platform leader offering best-in-class automation, workflow efficiencies, and bid optimization. In the next era of search engine marketing, we believe that the competitive edge search marketers need will be centered on intelligence to fuel insight-driven decision making for performance gains.

Contact us today to schedule a brief demo to learn more about how Skai Search can enhance your Microsoft Automated Bidding and arm your team with data, insights, and best-in-class campaign management.

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