Online advertising platforms regularly try new ideas to offer advertisers more ways to reach their target audience and spend more money. However, some of these ideas don’t provide enough value to business owners to justify using the option. The idea of accelerated delivery for PPC ads is one of those ideas that’s being phased out. Google recently stopped offering this option, and Microsoft is following suit. Last week, Microsoft Advertising announced that they will deprecate the accelerated delivery option for online ads.
As the name suggests, accelerated delivery allowed advertisers to send ads out more quickly than they would through standard placement options. This option was useful for advertisers who needed to spend a large budge quickly. The advertising platform would place the ads rapidly but at the expense of the click-through rate.
Instead of carefully choosing when and where to place ads, accelerated delivery essentially puts ads anywhere possible. For products that have a broad appeal, such a scattershot approach may not be a bad thing. Ideally, the only advertisers who would use this option are those who were confident that their ad would convert people, no matter who saw it or when.
However, most online ad campaigns rely on smart targeting to get the best result. It’s essential to choose the right audience and the right time to show the ad. Accelerated delivery requires advertisers to trade highly target ads for a high volume of ad placement.
After allowing accelerated delivery for months, it’s become clear to Google and Microsoft that accelerated delivery isn’t worth the tradeoff. It may have been used by the wrong advertisers, or the ads lacked broad appeal. Whatever the reason, accelerated delivery was more of a faster way to throw your ad budget down a hole than it was a faster way to get results on an ad campaign. Microsoft Advertising will deprecate all ads that use accelerated delivery to the standard option on November 1, about a month after Google did the same thing.
In a short post announcing the change, Microsoft states that the ads using accelerated delivery were underperforming and that businesses would be better served by using the standard delivery options.
Microsoft Advertising Senior Managers Abhishek Gupta and Cristiano Ventura wrote, “Budget-constrained campaigns using the Accelerated budget strategy tend to go dark earlier in the day and perform less efficiently. On the other hand, Standard budget strategy is a “smarter instrument,” as it picks and chooses the right time to serve with the intent of optimizing your performance based on multiple factors, such as the products and services targeted by your campaign, and availability of corresponding search during the day.”
Since this change will happen automatically, advertisers don’t have to do anything if they want to keep using accelerated delivery to the end. However, the fact that they’re deprecating the options suggests that advertisers are better served by making the change sooner than later. It’s also an excellent opportunity to review the targeting for ads to see if there are ways it can be improved.
For more news about recent updates and changes to Microsoft Advertising, read this article on Microsoft’s expansion of the responsive ads beta test.
