Shopping Campaigns in Microsoft Advertising: Store, Feed, Product Groups and Priority

This guide uses Microsoft Advertising Help only, mainly Create Product ads in a Shopping campaign and Get started with Microsoft Shopping campaigns, plus the articles linked where they are used. Checked on 12 November 2026. How Shopping works in Google Ads is in our Google Ads Shopping campaigns guide, feed attributes in general in our product feed guide, and Microsoft's Performance Max in Performance Max in Microsoft Advertising, so those are not repeated here.

What Shopping campaigns and Product ads are

Product ads are built from the products in your Microsoft Merchant Center catalog and show an image, price and seller details. Microsoft says they "use your specific product information to determine who sees your ads": there are no keywords to bid on. Instead, you bid on product groups (What are Product ads?).

Shopping campaigns are where Product ads live, and Microsoft notes they use more space on the results page than text ads. It lists four controls they give you (benefits of Shopping campaigns): campaign priority, custom labels in the feed, product groups, and selling in several countries, either one campaign per country or one campaign covering several. Each section below takes one of these in turn after the setup steps.

Step 1: verify and claim your domain

Before a store, Microsoft needs to know you own the site. There are two ways (Verify and claim your website's URL):

• Bing Webmaster Tools. Add the site and verify it with an XML file, an HTML meta tag or a CNAME record. Sign in with the same Microsoft account you use for Microsoft Advertising, or add that account as a user if someone else verified the site.
• A UET tag already on the site. The tag must register at least 50 events before the domain appears as an option, and after that "it can take an additional 48 hours". Setting up UET is covered in our Microsoft Advertising basics guide.

Use the top-level URL, such as https://example.com, because product links in your feed must be sub-paths or subdomains of it. Offers with other URLs are rejected. The URL must start with http:// or https:// and cannot be an IP address or include a port.

Step 2: create a Merchant Center store

Go to Tools > Merchant Center > Manage stores, select Create store, pick the verified domain and enter the store name and description (Create a Microsoft Merchant Center store). A new store is approved, rejected or queued for manual review, which "can take up to five days". Points to plan for:

• The store name appears in your Product ads. You cannot change the domain once the store exists.
• Only one active store per domain. A second store for the same domain is denied.
• You can run several stores, but not sell the same products through more than one.
• Stores created in a manager account are visible to all its accounts.
• Rejection reasons Microsoft lists include an unverified domain, no real privacy policy, a checkout without SSL, and no presence in a market Microsoft supports for Product ads. You can request a review once per store.

Step 3: get your products in

You can upload your own catalog feed under Tools > Merchant Center > Feeds > Create feed; Microsoft says processing can take "up to three business days". Most shops that already sell on Google import instead. The Google Merchant Center import works like this:

• Create the Microsoft store first, then open its Import tab, select New import and sign in to Google.
• Run it once now, or on a daily, weekly or monthly schedule, with email alerts for every run, only for issues, or none.
• Use Find and replace string in URL to swap tracking values, for example "Google" for "Bing", so clicks are attributed correctly.
• It imports all offers, "including pending and disapproved offers", into their own Google Import feed, with their Google feed labels. Only online offers with the Shopping destination in supported markets come over; local-only offers are skipped.
• Imported offers expire after 30 days, so the import has to run at least that often. A schedule handles it.
• Not every Google attribute is used by Microsoft; check the attribute list before relying on one.

If your shop runs on Shopify, Microsoft also offers the Microsoft Channel app for it. Feed quality matters as in Google: Microsoft's best practices say to refresh the feed daily, fill as many attributes as possible, avoid a "Miscellaneous" category, and use images of at least 220x220 pixels without watermarks, placeholders or more than 60% whitespace.

Step 4: create the campaign

Select Create, choose Sell products as the goal and Standard Shopping as the type. Microsoft then offers two kinds:

• Search: delivers to both audience and search placements.
• Audience: delivers to audience placements.

Three settings need care, because the first two cannot be fixed later without deleting and recreating the campaign:

• Store. Microsoft is plain about it: "you will not be able to change the store once you save your campaign."
• Country/region of sale, which must match the feed's country of sale. A feed label on the campaign can instead pick feeds with the same label across regions.
• Product filters. By default every product in the store is included; filter if the campaign should cover only some.

Bid strategies on offer during creation are cost per sale, Enhanced CPC, Maximize clicks, portfolio strategies and Target ROAS. Our guide to Microsoft Advertising bid strategies explains each. If you are bringing Google Shopping campaigns over, the campaign import needs a Microsoft store too, or you can choose a draft store and finish it later, but campaigns on a draft store stay inactive until you do (Import Shopping campaigns from Google Ads). The rest of the import is in our Google Ads import guide.

Product groups and custom labels

A new Shopping campaign gets a default ad group holding one product group, All products, with one bid. Each ad group has exactly one product group. Microsoft recommends splitting it so each group holds closely related products, up to 5 levels deep, by attributes such as category, brand, condition, item ID, product type and custom label (Understand and use product groups). Microsoft's example of 5 levels: Office supplies > Office instruments > Writing and drawing instruments > Pens and pencils > Pens > New.

To split a group, go to Campaigns > Product groups, pick the ad group and select + next to the group. To leave products out, set "Everything else in 'All products'" to Exclude. Bids can be changed in bulk by percentage across an ad group, campaign or account.

Custom labels are your own fields in the feed, for example best sellers, seasonal or high margin. Each offer can have up to 5, each label value up to 200 characters, with up to 1,000 unique values per label. They let you group products by business goals that are not in the product data itself.

Shopping does not use keywords to trigger ads, but Microsoft says you can still add negative keywords to keep products away from irrelevant searches.

Bids, minimum bids and the Shopping tab

Bids can be set at product group, ad group or campaign level. Microsoft's minimum is 0.01 in the campaign currency, but products bid below the recommended minimum, 0.05 in most listed markets and 0.50 in India, can serve "in the shopping tab only" (Minimum bid for Microsoft Shopping campaigns). Lowering an existing campaign below 0.05 therefore cuts its reach elsewhere on the network.

The Shopping tab lets searchers filter products. To appear there Microsoft asks for GTIN, brand and MPN on every offer, color, age group and gender for apparel, and images of at least 300 x 300 pixels.

On starting bids, Microsoft's advice is not to underbid: since Product ads compete with text ads, set first bids "equal to or greater than" your bids on the keywords closest to those products, then raise bids on the products that perform best.

Campaign priority

When the same product is in several Shopping campaigns, priority decides which campaign bids. Campaigns start at Low; you can set Medium or High. Microsoft's rules:

• The higher priority campaign bids, even if a lower one has a larger bid.
• When it runs out of budget, the next priority down takes over.
• Campaigns with the same priority: the highest bid is used.
• If a business rule such as location targeting or a minimum bid filters out the higher campaign's product, the lower campaign's product serves.

Microsoft's example: a winter clothing campaign at High and a women's clothing campaign at Low both contain sweaters. Sweaters bid from the winter campaign until its budget is spent, then from the women's campaign. Priority is supported on Standard Shopping campaigns.

Shopping campaigns and Performance Max

Performance Max can use the same Merchant Center store. Microsoft says "Performance Max campaigns are automatically set to the highest priority. However, when the Performance Max campaign budget is exhausted, other campaigns with lower priority will participate in the auction." So if a product is in both, the Performance Max campaign bids first and Standard Shopping only steps in once that budget is gone. To keep a product out of Performance Max, exclude its item ID in the asset group's listing groups. Smart Shopping campaigns are upgraded to Performance Max; how that campaign type works, including listing groups, is in our Performance Max guide.

Reports and the "Product offers not found" error

Shopping reports are under Reporting > Templates > Product ads. How the Reports page, scheduling and data delays work is in our Microsoft Ads reporting guide. Microsoft also points to the shopping report on the Dimensions tab, the share of voice report and the search term report, and to comparing Product ads with text ads over time, since they have different CPCs, CTRs and conversion rates.

If a campaign shows "Product offers not found", Microsoft's checklist is:

• Store: active, not rejected, and not a draft store left from an import.
• Feed: Enable publishing ticked, and the feed's location and language match the campaign's country/region of sale. New or updated feeds can take "up to ~72 hours" to become eligible offers.
• Products: approved, in stock and not set to an expiry date in the past. The Product issues tab in Merchant Center has a downloadable rejection report.
• Filters: campaign or product group filters that leave nothing to serve.

How we set it up

This part is our opinion, not Microsoft's. For a shop already on Google Shopping, we verify the domain through the UET tag if it is in place, create the store, and set a daily scheduled import from Google Merchant Center so the 30-day expiry never bites. We then run one Standard Shopping Search campaign, split product groups by custom label (best sellers, margin bands, seasonal), and only add a second campaign with a higher priority when a product set needs its own budget. If the client also runs Performance Max, we decide product by product which campaign should own it, because Performance Max wins the priority.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a Microsoft Merchant Center store for Shopping campaigns?

Yes. Product ads come from the catalog in a Merchant Center store, and Google Shopping campaigns are only imported if a store, or a draft store, is chosen.

Can I use my Google Merchant Center feed in Microsoft Advertising?

Yes. The Google import tool in Microsoft Merchant Center brings offers over once or on a schedule. Imported offers expire after 30 days, so schedule it.

What is the minimum bid for Microsoft Shopping campaigns?

0.01 in the campaign currency, but bids below the recommended minimum (0.05 in most listed markets, 0.50 in India) can serve in the Shopping tab only.

Can I change the store on a Microsoft Shopping campaign?

No. The store cannot be changed after the campaign is saved; you would need to create a new campaign with the right store.

Does Performance Max take priority over Shopping campaigns?

Yes. Microsoft sets Performance Max to the highest priority. Lower priority Shopping campaigns join the auction when its budget is exhausted.

Shopping ads send people to product pages, so those pages need to load fast and sell. See our website development service and all our services, or email [email protected].