As a new online advertiser or even an online advertising veteran, the best way to avoid editorial disapprovals is to make sure you’re familiar with the Microsoft adCenter online advertising guidelines. These guidelines are put in place to provide a high quality search experience for users and publishers and maintain a fair marketplace for advertisers.  

You may want to add the above link to your favorites for easy reference whenever you have questions — all the basics are covered. If you put yourself in the position of someone searching on Bing or Yahoo!, many of these guidelines should be common sense. Some of our guidelines are put in place for legal and/or regulatory reasons.

In order to make your editorial experience as smooth as possible, first familiarize yourself with the guidelines and then take these best practices into consideration when creating ads:

1. Ask yourself, “Is what I’m advertising allowed?” If you’re not sure, refer to the guidelines to confirm that it is not included in under the disallowed content section. Even if what you’re advertising is legal, it could be disallowed by our guidelines for another reason.

2. Make sure there’s a relevant connection between your ads, keywords and landing pages.

a. Only bid on keywords that are relevant to the landing page.

b. Make sure your ads clearly describe the web site offering.

c. Make sure your landing page is full of useful content and is easy to navigate.

One way to think about relevance is to put yourself in the position of the searcher, and ask yourself the following two questions:

Question 1: If I searched on this keyword, would I want to click on this ad?

Question 2: If I clicked on this ad, would I be satisfied by the content?

If you cannot honestly answer both of these questions in the affirmative, then you may need to revise your keyword list, modify your ad copy or change your landing page.

For example, say you’re advertising video games. You would want to bid on keywords related to video games. If you bid on a specific video game title, you should use dynamic text to insert that video game title into the ad copy and make sure there is content related to that particular video game title on the landing page.

Keep in mind, however, it’s best to avoid using dynamic text if doing so would cause direct competitors’ brand names to be inserted into the ad copy, which would violate our Intellectual Property Guidelines (more extensive coverage of Microsoft adCenter’s Intellectual Property Guidelines will be included in a forthcoming blog post).

Stay tuned to the adCenter Blog for more updates and tips on Microsoft adCenter editorial guidelines.

Thanks for reading!