Microsoft Ads: Create A Campaign

This document covers creating a basic Shopping Campaign in Microsoft Ads.


Stage 1

  1. Go to Microsoft Ads  and login to your account.
  2. Select Campaigns
  3. Select Create Campaign
  4. Select Sell products from your catalog
  5. Select Search Ads
  6. Select Next

Stage 2

  1. Enter a campaign name
  2. Set an initial budget that protects against overspending until you get a feel for costs and traffic during the first weeks of campaign activity. We suggest $10 per day (~$300 per month)
  3. You can leave the default bid strategy to manual, as other bid strategies only have the chance of performing well when there are already consistent  conversions and sales in the campaign to use as a data set for decision making.
  4. For Store, select your store. You’ll usually only have one store to choose from, unless you are running campaigns for multiple stores via the same Microsoft Ads account.
  5. Select your Country/region of sale.

THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SETTING when creating a shopping campaign for two reasons:

  • If the country you select for your store does not match the country you selected when setting up your catalog, your products will not be available for the campaign
  • Once you select the country, it cannot be changed once you save the campaign. If you make a mistake you’ll need to pause the campaign and create a new one from scratch.

  1. For Location, select the countries you would like to advertise in. I suggest if you plan to target multiple countries to setup a specific campaign for each country.
  2. Leave your default bid at $1 until you start receiving traffic and you know how much you would like to increase or decrease the bids.
  3. We’ll skip ad schedules, device modifications, and ad distribution for later advanced sessions on optimizing campaigns after they have started generating traffic.
  4. Select Save. 

If you have recently created your product catalog and your products have not been approved yet, you’ll see the warning “Product offers not found.” This will disappear once the products are approved.  Expect to start seeing traffic in your first shopping campaign within a few days of your products approval in your catalog.​