If you’re already running successful Google Ads campaigns, Microsoft Advertising is one of the easiest ways to expand your reach. Much of what you already know carries over, and importing existing campaigns means you don’t have to start from scratch.

That said, each platform has its own strengths and quirks. Taking the time to tailor your campaigns for Microsoft Advertising can make a noticeable difference to performance.

Here are eight ways to get more out of Microsoft Advertising, from setting up your account to refining keywords, bids, and budgets over time.

To find out more about how you can diagnose, optimize, and scale Microsoft Ads with Optmyzr watch this Learn With Optmyzr:

How to import your Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Advertising

One of the biggest advantages of Microsoft Advertising is that you don’t have to build your campaigns from scratch. You can import your existing Google Ads campaigns, which makes it much quicker to get up and running.

How to import your Google Ads campaigns

From the navigation menu, go to Import and select Import from Google Ads. You’ll then have two options:

• Quick import uses Microsoft’s default settings to bring your campaigns across. If you manage multiple Google Ads or Google Merchant Center accounts under a manager account, you’ll automatically be taken through the Smart import flow instead.
• Customize lets you review and adjust settings before importing. You can change budgets, campaign statuses, bidding, schedules, and choose exactly what gets imported.

If you manage multiple accounts, Microsoft Advertising also lets you import up to 10 Google Ads accounts at once, as long as you’ve set up multiple accounts on both platforms.

You can choose to import your campaigns once or set up an automatic schedule to keep changes synced between Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. Microsoft recommends importing one Google Ads account into one Microsoft Advertising account, rather than combining multiple accounts into a single destination.

Check these settings after the import

Most campaigns import without much trouble, but it’s still worth reviewing a few areas before you start spending:

• Bids and budgets
• Targeting settings
• Negative keywords
• Video assets
• Quality Score

Quality Score deserves a closer look. Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising calculate it differently, so a strong Quality Score in Google doesn’t automatically translate to Microsoft Ads.

One other thing to watch for: if a paused Google Ads campaign keeps becoming active again in Microsoft Advertising, check whether you’ve enabled automatic imports. Scheduled imports will continue syncing changes from Google Ads, including campaign status.

For more information you check out these guides from Microsoft here and here.

8 tips while migrating from Google Ads to Microsoft Ads

1. Turn off Google Ads auto-import.

If you’re using automatic imports, it’s worth taking a few minutes to review the settings. By default, Microsoft Advertising can sync changes you make in Google Ads, including campaign status, bids, bid strategies, and budgets.

That can be helpful if you want to keep both accounts aligned. But if you’re planning to manage Microsoft Advertising separately, make sure those settings match the way you want to work.

To review or change them, hover over Import in the left-hand navigation menu and select Scheduled (read more).

2. Run a health check to flag issues

Make sure conversions aren’t being over- or under-counted, every ad group has negative keywords in place, and your ads are sending traffic to the right landing pages.

If you’re an Optmyzr user, the Account Structure Audit can check all of this for you.

Run it and you’ll get one score for your account, plus a green/yellow/red breakdown so you know exactly where to focus first.. Your score only includes checks that apply to your account.

For Microsoft Ads specifically, it’ll catch conversion tracking that’s over- and under-counting, campaigns and ad groups with no negative keywords, and a Landing Page Score as part of the Quality Score breakdown.

Once the audit is complete, you’ll get an AI-generated summary highlighting your account’s biggest strengths and areas for improvement, so you can quickly see where to focus first.

If you want more detail, each score card includes an Ask AI button that opens Sidekick, Optmyzr’s AI assistant, to explain the issue and suggest how to fix it.

3. Keep your Shopping campaigns and merchant feed in sync (for ecommerce advertisers)

To get the best performance from your Shopping campaigns, make sure your campaign structure stays in sync with your merchant feed. Products that have been added to your feed should be included in the right product or asset groups, while products that have been removed shouldn’t leave behind empty groups.

The Shopping Campaign Management tool helps you manage all of this from one place. You can create new Standard Shopping, Performance Max Retail, or Optmyzr Smart campaigns, update existing campaign structures, manage asset groups, and refresh your campaigns using the latest data from your merchant feed.

When you’re setting up a new campaign, Sidekick can also guide you through the process.

It can recommend the most suitable campaign type, suggest how to structure your asset groups, and help you decide which feed attributes and performance signals to use.

Keeping campaigns in sync is just as important after launch. Running a sync updates your existing asset and listing groups, adds products that have recently appeared in your feed, and flags products that are no longer available so you can remove them.

It’s also worth keeping an eye on the bigger picture.

The Shopping Dashboard gives you a centralized view of your Shopping and Performance Max Retail campaigns, merchant feeds, campaign health, feed sync status, product performance, and optimization opportunities.

Finally, don’t overlook the health of the feed itself. The Shopping Feed Audit reviews your Microsoft Merchant Feed and flags issues that are worth fixing or optimizing.

4. Optimize Shopping campaign bids and product segmentation

Once your feed is clean and your campaign structure is in good shape, the next step is making sure you’re bidding the right amount on the right products.

Optmyzr includes several tools to help you fine-tune Shopping campaign bids.

• Manage Bids identifies high-performing product groups that may deserve higher bids
• Find Expensive Product Groups highlights groups with unusually high CPAs or lots of clicks but no conversions

To cut wasted spend:

• Add Low-Performing Search Queries as Negatives surfaces expensive search terms that aren’t converting
• Reduce Bid Gaps finds product groups where bids are set much higher than the average CPC, helping prevent unnecessary cost spikes
• For ROAS-based bidding, Optimize Targets lets you apply if-then-else logic to adjust targets automatically

Product segmentation is just as important as bid optimization.

Smart Product Labeler in Optmyzr groups products into performance-based categories—Heroes, Sidekicks, Villains, Zombies, and Flukes—based on ROAS and cost. That makes it easier to apply different bidding strategies to your best sellers, borderline performers, and products that consistently underperform, instead of treating your entire catalog the same.

5. Monitor performance regularly

Review your account regularly to catch problems before they become expensive. Pay close attention to CPCs and CPAs, since gradual increases can be easy to miss. It’s also worth watching impressions, CTR, and budget pacing—changes in these metrics often signal an issue before it shows up in your conversion data.

Optmyzr can do a lot of this monitoring.

System-generated Anomaly Alerts track key metrics like cost per conversion and clicks at the account and campaign level, so unusual changes don’t go unnoticed.

If you want more control, you can also create custom KPI Alerts to notify you when metrics cross a threshold, change by a certain percentage, or start trending in the wrong direction.

To keep spending on track, set a monthly target budget and monitor your pacing throughout the month. Optmyzr can alert you when you’ve reached key spending milestones and even pause campaigns automatically once your budget has been exhausted. It can also resume them at the start of the next month if needed.

To spot longer-term trends, use the Account Dashboard’s Metric Comparison and Performance Change widgets. They make it easier to compare date ranges, identify traffic shifts, and see how performance is changing over time instead of reacting to individual alerts.

6. Analyze traffic performance

When performance changes, the first step is figuring out what’s behind it. Is it a particular campaign, audience, device, or location that’s driving higher CPCs, rising CPAs, or changes in traffic?

PPC Investigator helps answer those questions without having to piece together multiple reports manually.

Compare two date ranges, choose the metric you want to investigate, and the Cause Chart shows how changes in one metric relate to the others.

From there, Root Cause Analysis highlights the campaigns, ad groups, keywords, or devices that contributed most to the change. If you suspect the change was caused by an edit to the account, the built-in Change History also shows what changed and who made it.

It’s also worth reviewing how your landing pages are performing.

Landing Page Analysis groups landing pages into four categories—High Performer, High Potential, Expensive, and Others—based on CTR and conversion rate. The “Expensive” category is often the best place to start, since it highlights pages that attract clicks but struggle to convert.

Location data can reveal another layer of insight. Look at which countries, regions, or cities are generating conversions and which are simply driving spend.

Geo HeatMap makes those patterns easier to spot by displaying performance on a color-coded map, so you can quickly see which locations are performing above or below your account average.

Finally, compare performance across the segments that matter most. Looking at campaigns, ad groups, devices, and networks side by side often reveals opportunities that aren’t obvious in standard reports.

7. Start optimizing for high-converting search terms

Review your search terms regularly

Search terms can tell you two things: which queries deserve to become keywords, and which ones are costing you money without delivering results.

Search Term N-Grams breaks search queries into individual words and phrases, making it easier to spot patterns across large search term reports.

If you find high-performing queries that aren’t already keywords, Keyword Lasso lets you add them in bulk while checking for duplicates elsewhere in the account. It can also build single-keyword ad groups (SKAGs) from your best-performing search terms. If you want a more complete view, Turbo Mode surfaces every search term that received at least one click.

To cut wasted spend, Negative Keyword Finder identifies irrelevant or underperforming search terms that are worth adding as negatives. One limitation for Microsoft Ads accounts: Turbo Mode isn’t available for this tool.

If you’d rather automate the process, Rule Engine can monitor search terms for you and either apply changes automatically or notify your team by email, Slack, or Google Sheets. You can also describe your optimization goal in plain language and let AI build the strategy before reviewing it.

Review keyword performance

Keywords that attract clicks but never convert are often worth revisiting.

Pause Non-Converting Keywords identifies keywords that have received enough clicks to expect a conversion, based on statistical significance rather than a fixed click threshold. You can choose how aggressively the tool flags keywords before pausing them.

For manual bidding,‘Reduce bids for Expensive Keywords’ highlights keywords with unusually high CPAs or lots of non-converting clicks and recommends bid reductions within the limits you set.

First Page Bridger identifies high-Quality Score keywords that are just below the first page and recommends the minimum bid increase needed to improve their visibility. If those keywords use automated bidding, adjusting the Target CPA or Target ROAS at the ad group level is the recommended approach instead.

Review your ad copy

Even small improvements to ad copy can increase click-through rates and improve campaign performance over time.

AB Testing for Ads compares ads within the same ad group using statistically significant data, helping you identify winning ads and pause underperformers. When creating new ads, it can also recommend headlines, descriptions, and display URLs based on your best-performing ads, or generate AI-assisted suggestions for Responsive Search Ads using content from your website.

For larger updates, Ad Text Optimization lets you review and edit RSA headlines, descriptions, and ad copy in bulk, with AI suggestions available throughout the workflow.

Keep budgets on track

Review your budgets throughout the month to make sure high-performing campaigns don’t become limited by budget, and lower-performing campaigns don’t continue overspending.

Spend Projection forecasts likely spend for the rest of your budget cycle using historical trends and seasonality, providing expected, minimum, and maximum spend estimates alongside an AI-generated summary.

When budgets need to be redistributed, Reallocate and Optimize Budgets helps move spend toward campaigns with the greatest opportunity.

You can let the tool recommend the best allocation, optimize for a specific KPI such as ROAS or CPA, or use the Budget Simulator to test different budget scenarios before making changes. Sidekick can also answer questions directly within the tool, such as which campaigns are underpacing or how a budget increase might affect projected spend.

Review performance by time of day

Performance often varies by hour and day of the week, especially for manually managed campaigns.

Hour of the Week Analysis highlights when your campaigns perform best, while Hour of the Week Bid Adjustments lets you apply bid adjustments based on those insights. One advantage for Microsoft Ads accounts is that both tools respect each campaign’s individual time zone, even when analyzing multiple campaigns together.

Fine-tune automated bidding targets

If a campaign is converting well but losing impression share because of ad rank, adjusting Target CPA or Target ROAS at the ad group level may help capture more traffic.

Optimize Target CPA and Optimize Target ROAS, both built with Rule Engine, identify these opportunities and recommend or automate target adjustments where appropriate.

8. Report on your results

Regular reporting helps you understand what’s working, what’s changed, and where to focus next. Whether you’re reporting to clients, stakeholders, or just reviewing your own accounts, the goal is the same: turn performance data into useful insights.

A good report should highlight the metrics that matter most, including campaign performance, top-performing ad copy, search terms, click-through and conversion rates, and how results compare with previous reporting periods.

Report Designer makes it easy to build these reports without starting from scratch. You can begin with a pre-built template, create a custom report using widgets like Quality Score, Hour of the Week, Geo HeatMap, or PPC Investigator, or simply describe the report you want and let AI generate a first draft for you.

Reports can be scheduled to run automatically and shared as PDFs or links on a daily, weekly, or monthly schedule.

If you don’t have time to review every chart, Sidekick can summarize the report for you. It can surface the top insights, highlight what’s performing well, and point out areas that may need attention.

If you manage multiple accounts, the Multi-Account Report tool brings data from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Analytics, Amazon Ads, Meta Ads, and LinkedIn Ads into a single executive report. Dedicated widgets aggregate metrics across accounts, making it easier to monitor overall performance without switching between platforms or combining data manually.

Manage your Microsoft Ads workflow in one place

The tools covered above are all available in Optmyzr, but you don’t always have to work from the Optmyzr interface.

If you already use an AI assistant like Claude, you can connect it to your Optmyzr account and ask it to complete many of the same tasks in natural language. For example, you can generate a performance report, check which campaigns are underspending this month, or build a Rule Engine strategy by describing what you want to achieve.

You can also use Sidekick throughout Optmyzr itself. It can summarize an account audit, explain why a budget recommendation was made, or pull out the key takeaways from a report, helping you spend less time digging through data and more time acting on it.

Final thoughts

If you’re already running Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising is a straightforward way to expand your reach without starting from scratch. But like any advertising platform, getting the best results takes more than importing campaigns and letting them run.

The tips we’ve covered—from campaign setup and feed optimization to reporting and ongoing optimization—will help you build a stronger Microsoft Ads account and keep it performing over time.

If you’d like a faster way to do all this, you can try Optmyzr free for 14 days and explore the tools covered throughout this guide.