The quality of Microsoft’s search advertising system has gone down over time, as has Google’s, as they have taken more and more control away from advertisers. At best, they greatly overestimate the ability of their system to produce good results. At worst, they are intentionally doing things to increase their revenue, knowing that they are increasing costs for their customers while producing worse results for them.
About a month ago Microsoft announced they would start automatically running ads for customers generated by Microsoft, without the approval of customers. That seems rather ill-conceived idea, as they are putting words into the mouths of their customers. But much worse, looking at ads that have been generated for us, the implementation is even more ill-conceived, as the ads are often not even coherent.
When customers go to the Microsoft Ads web interface, they might now notice a somewhat vague message about this:
We’ve created recommended ad(s) which could improve your performance. Please review these recommendations as they may be eligible to automatically apply at a later date.
From there you can see up to 50 ad suggestions. While a few of the ones currently suggested to us are decent, most are not close to that. Here is one where the ad text looks like it mixed up the words install and upgrade:
As written, it doesn’t make sense.
In another example of this, this text seems like it should refer to second best instead of second chance:
Somehow they are messing up phrases like that.
This ad text combines an incoherent message with this odd capitalization of a word with an apostrophe in it:
It would appear their system isn’t advanced enough to understand not to add capitalization there.
Sometimes the headlines and ad text don’t go together, this headline makes no sense in the context of the service being advertised or the ad text:
The ad text of this one claims we provide an alternative to something that isn’t a thing as far as we are aware:
Others advertise services we don’t offer, like this one offering to install PrestaShop:
Here is the ad text for another one, which, among other issues, emphatically claims we do something, which we don’t do:
Probably the worst ad though suggests we get websites hacked:
It doesn’t look like Microsoft did basic testing before rolling out these generated ads.
Despite them creating this content, they have a notice in the documenation for that says that it is the customer’s content:
Any ads or content created by Microsoft Advertising as part of this program are subject to editorial review, and will remain your “Content” as defined by your Microsoft Advertising Agreement.