Microsoft Advertising's April product release is one of the more practical drops of the year. Six updates that close gaps with Google Ads, expand reporting transparency, and remove the friction that has historically held back larger account migrations.
The highest leverage change is the Google Ads import for Performance Max with new customer acquisition goals. The other updates are useful, but the import upgrade is the one that unblocks the most common migration scenario for agencies.
PMax with new customer acquisition goals now imports from Google Ads
Microsoft Advertising has expanded its import tooling to include Google Ads Performance Max campaigns that use new customer acquisition (NCA) goals. The rollout reached all advertisers in April.
The practical mechanics matter for any team running parallel campaigns.
Google Ads PMax campaigns with NCA goals will import if they are not already in the Microsoft Advertising account. Existing NCA goal configurations stay untouched, so a previous Microsoft setup will not be overwritten. Google's website visitor audience segments convert to rule based remarketing lists. Auto created audience lists map to Microsoft Advertising's equivalent lists. Where a list is unsupported, the importer offers to substitute the all converters list or import without audience specifications.
Microsoft is conservative on customer classification. Customers marked unknown by the data signal default to existing rather than new. That keeps the NCA goal from overcrediting new acquisitions during the migration window.
ADAC Car Insurance is the case study Microsoft highlighted. The brand generated nearly 600 percent return on ad spend with new customers during the initial weeks of running NCA goals, driven by an explicit focus on first time policy buyers.
Landing page reporting for Performance Max
Final URL reporting is now available for PMax campaigns. Advertisers can see spend, impressions, clicks, conversion revenue, and ROAS by landing page. Views can be segmented by campaign, asset group, or custom parameters.
The most common use is verifying that final URL expansion is routing customers to the right pages. Search term insights reporting now defaults to showing search terms as the primary column, with rollout completing through May.
Seasonality adjustments for portfolio bid strategies
Seasonality adjustments now work on campaigns using portfolio bid strategies. Previously they were limited to individual campaign strategies, which made portfolio level promotions harder to manage.
Microsoft's guidance is straightforward. Apply a single consistent adjustment across all campaigns in the portfolio. Use different adjustments only when campaigns show genuinely distinct seasonal patterns. This is the sensible default. Excessive variation undercuts the portfolio learning logic.
Campaign name limit raised to 400 characters
The campaign name character limit moved from 128 to 400 characters across the UI, API, Editor, imports, and reporting. The change matches Meta and Google limits.
This is a small feature with outsized impact for large accounts. Structured naming conventions for automated bid management, attribution pipelines, and agency reporting all benefit. Teams that rely on suffix conventions for campaign metadata can stop truncating.
Autogenerated assets in responsive search ads
Responsive search ads that lack the maximum number of user supplied text assets will now show autogenerated text assets. The aim is to address underperformance in campaigns with insufficient or stale creative assets.
Microsoft excludes sensitive industries and honours existing autogenerated asset settings during Google imports. Opt out is available for advertisers who prefer to keep all copy manually controlled.
The useful interpretation is that this is a fallback rather than a default behaviour. Campaigns with full asset coverage will not see autogenerated copy unless explicitly enabled.
Merchant Center store and domain updates
Store name and website domain changes now process directly within Merchant Center. No support ticket required. Ads continue running on the current approved information until the review completes.
For Microsoft Advertising specialists managing multiple merchant accounts, this removes one of the more tedious operational tasks. The previous flow required reaching out to support every time a brand rebranded a store URL or merged operations under a new domain.
What to do with the release
Three practical takeaways.
First, the Google Ads PMax import with NCA is the right trigger to revisit migration plans. If you held off because the NCA goal mapping was a blocker, that blocker is now gone.
Second, landing page reporting combined with the search term reporting rolling out in May closes the biggest transparency gap in PMax. Build the diagnostic workflow now rather than waiting for full rollout.
Third, the 400 character campaign name limit is the kind of change that quietly fixes ten different downstream automations. Teams running structured naming should audit their conventions and consider standardising across Microsoft and Google. For new test accounts, Microsoft Advertising activation coupons are still the cleanest way to onboard at scale without exhausting committed budget on early experimentation.
This insight is based on content originally published on the Microsoft Advertising Blog, rewritten with added context and perspective by Scepter Digital.
