Google Ads is shutting down the accelerated ad delivery option starting October 7. On Friday, Microsoft Advertising announced it will follow suit.
Why? Starting November 1, all Microsoft Advertising Search, Dynamic Search Ads Shopping campaigns will automatically start serving with standard delivery.
Why? Accelerated delivery was designed to serve ads as early and often as possible throughout the day. It was never a good idea to use it if your campaign budget was restrained, but both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising point out how inefficient it is for budget-constrained campaigns, so perhaps advertisers weren’t using it correctly. Google also says CPCs are higher earlier in the day because budgets haven’t run out yet. Both companies also say that standard delivery is now better at predicting the best times to serve your ads.
“Standard budget strategy is a ‘smarter instrument,’ as it picks and chooses the right time to serve with the intent of optimising your performance based on multiple factors, such as the products and services targeted by your campaign, and availability of corresponding search during the day,” said Microsoft Advertising’s Abhishek Gupta and Cristiano Ventura in the announcement.
Why we should care. Ad delivery will be determined by machine learning in both platforms. Parity between the two platforms with this setting makes sense for Microsoft Advertising and the advertisers who import campaigns from Google.
In the Microsoft Advertising UI, this setting is located under “Daily budget options” on the Campaign settings window.
About The Author
Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media’s Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.