Tips from the Editorial Team: Avoiding Account Closures in Microsoft Advertising adCenter

Here at Microsoft, we want to ensure that ads serving on Bing and Yahoo! are not only relevant, but high quality as well. For this reason, we have Editorial Guidelines to ensure that users are getting both relevant and high quality experiences. The Editorial team’s job is to ensure that advertisers are following the guidelines, as well as to ensure that the advertisers and users are having high quality experiences.

To accomplish these goals, the Editorial Team does daily guideline reviews in the Bing and Yahoo! results, as well as reviews of the terms submitted by advertisers every week. Occasionally, these reviews require a thorough review of an advertiser’s entire account for possible fraud, compromise and/or abuse. The Editorial Team uses adCenter to determine if an advertiser should be escalated for closure. Closing an advertiser account is the most impactful action that the Editorial Team can take against a violating advertiser, as it prevents an advertiser from ever showing their content on Bing or Yahoo!

More moderate approaches include:

·       Adding keyword blocks for non-compliant keywords (prevents any advertiser from bidding on particular keywords)

·       Adding advertiser blocks for particular keywords (blocks the advertiser from bidding on particular keywords)

·       The quality score for the keywords will be affected

·       Rejecting non-compliant keywords, ads, or landing pages

In general, the criteria for an advertiser closure are drawn from the Exclusion reasons found in the Relevance and Quality Guidelines.

Non-compliance reasons include:

·       Sites that include viruses, malware, spyware, or other self-installing programs.

·       Business models that attempt to mislead site visitors, or that seem deceptive or fraudulent.

·       Sites that misrepresent the origin or intent of their content and as a result are likely to deceive a portion of the target audience.

·       Phishing sites that try to trick visitors into sharing personally identifiable information (PII) not normally shared with a third party, or where the use of such information could cause the user to be defrauded.

·       Pages that consist entirely of advertising, or whose main purpose is to direct site visitors to advertising.

·       Link farms or parked domains.

·       Sites operated by advertisers who consistently violate our Editorial Policies

o   Only advertisers promoting content in violation of high risk policies such as Pharmaceutical or Gambling are at risk for account closure

·       Advertisers that submit large numbers of irrelevant keywords—even if their landing pages don’t violate the Relevance and Quality policy.

o   This behavior is categorized by pervasive use of completely irrelevant keywords (generally trending or popular keywords) where there is no related content available on the landing page

Tips to ensure your accounts are not considered for possible account closure:

·       Bid only on keywords that your website has relevant content for

·       Ensure your landing page is filled with valuable and interesting content associated with the bidded keyword

·       Review the Editorial guidelines to ensure your business model is compliant prior to submitting

Hopefully this information will help you gain a better understanding of the account closure process and how to avoid your account being closed.

Thanks for reading,

Matt Capuano, Optimization Program Manager