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How to Exclude Audience Network in Bing Ads?
By Anar Kazimov
Why Exclude Audience Network Ads?
As you guys know Audience Network Ads in Bing is basically Bing showing your ads on its network of websites and on bing itself, for instance, on Bing Maps. If you running say a basic Bing Shopping Ad this would be a total waste, check a real life example on Photo 1.
How Should I do it?
- Go to Settings of your campaign and navigate to the Exclusions section.
- Enter the following sites: msn.com, outlook.live.com, outlook.com, and bing.com.
- Click Save.
Instructions for Blocking Traffic from Specific Domains
Remove the “www.” prefix when entering the domain. For example, to block traffic from www.contoso.com, enter “contoso.com”.
Note: Websites included in the Microsoft sites and selected Traffic category cannot be manually excluded for delivery.
How to Add More Websites
Obviously there are more websites in the Network than simply outlook and msn, so how should we get an updated list of them each week as our campaign runs and update it?
Using Reports!
- Go to Reporting > Default Reports > Website URL
- Click the column section and add Website URL column. This will give you list of websites
- Once done click download button and get the excel list of website your campaign has shown for (you would likely need to do this regularly)
Removing WWW From Bing Audience Sites
If your campaigns ran for anything longer than 2 weeks you likely to have over 100 websites in the list. Manually removing www. prefix could be time consuming. Use the following Excel formula to speed up the process
=IF(LEFT(A2, 4)=”www.”, RIGHT(A2, LEN(A2)-4), A2)
Final Steps
Simply copy entire cleaned up column and add it to the exclusion list and click the save button. That’s it your ads won’t show up on these websites. You should do this regularly, at least once a month and from my experience savings in Bing Shopping campaigns, for example, could be as much as 50%, cutting in half your customer acquisition cost.
Additionally change the ad distribution setting of your ad groups from ‘The entire Microsoft Advertising Network (recommended)’ to ‘Microsoft sites and select traffic’ only. This will prevent your ads from being shown on the Audience Network.