The Microsoft Audience Network whilst designed to expand your reach often leads to wasted ad spend and has become increasingly hard to evaluate and remove from campaigns. This short guide will demonstrate how to identify and exclude unwanted websites from your Microsoft Audience Network.

Identifying The Publishers

Microsoft have a built in reporting template that allows you to explore the website URLs that your adverts are serving on. In their own words you can assess which perform well for your campaigns and decide if you need to exclude low-performing websites. If only it was that simple!

You will need to click on the Reporting Tab on the left sidebar then select Templates. Scroll down to find Targeting and Placements then the very last option is Website URL (Publisher).

Once you have opened this report you will be able to view the Website URLs that are triggering spend and how they are converting. It is here you should start to note down which URLs you wish to exclude. We recommend downloading the report as a CSV export to easily select the Website URLs for the next stage.

Excluding the Publishers

Now you have your list of Website URLs to exclude you will need to navigate to the Content Suitability page within Microsoft Ads. This by default is unpinned, you can find it in the left side navigation under Tools > Content and Data. Then simply select it to bring up the website exclusion lists.

You need to do this step at an account-level.

Click Create, then name your list and paste in the Website URLs you have selected each on a separated line. Hit save and you have now created your exclusion list!

Restrictions: You can only have 10,000 URLs per Exclusion list and there is a limit of 5,000 that you can add at a single time. You can add up to three website exclusion lists per account which gives you a maximum of 30,000.

Tip: There are common culprits for wasted spend amongst the audience network which we come across in accounts which are listed below that cover almost the entire audience network. However you should cross-reference actual performance before excluding:

msn.com
bing.com
outlook.com
outlook.live.com
zone.msn.com
ntp.msn.com
superapp.msn.com
microsoftcasualgames.com
windows.msn.com

Utilizing Microsoft Support

The other route is to simply reach out to Microsoft Ads support and request that they exclude the Audience Network from your campaigns. While this is equally effective, be prepared that this process might take weeks to be implemented depending on support and if the need is urgent you may be best actioning it yourself for greater control.

Conclusion

As long as you analyse your Website URL Report data accurately you are now able to apply exclusions via website exclusion lists in Microsoft Ads. Ensure that the URLs you are excluding are the culprits of wasted spend and you will reap the rewards in your Microsoft Ads account.