This guide will walk you through setting up Audience Optimization for Microsoft Ads step by step. If you haven’t already, please read the short article below first so you understand the general strategy:

Unlock Better Ad Optimization with Audience Optimization


Step 1 – Review your existing Microsoft UET Tag configuration

Audience Optimization will send your accurate conversion data to Microsoft Ads. So the first step is to review your existing setup and make sure your Microsoft UET Tag is not sending conversion events, as this will pollute your data.

Review your UET Tag setup in GTM, plugins, Shopify apps, WordPress add-ons, or any manually added tracking code.

If you previously added any Microsoft conversion tracking scripts or created browser-side conversion events through GTM or plugins, remove or disable those now so your UET Tag only sends basic page load signals and no conversion events from the browser.

Finally, edit your existing Microsoft Ads Conversion Goals and set them to Secondary so Microsoft will no longer optimize based on your old, polluted data. You’ll be creating new ones soon.


Step 2 - Ensure Auto-Tagging is Turned On

Before you get started, make sure you have auto-tagging turned on in your Microsoft Ads account by going to Campaigns > Settings > Account level options and check the “Add Microsoft Click ID (MSCLKID) to URLs” box.

 

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Step 3 - Create One or More New Conversion Goals

While you do have the ability to use your current Conversion Goals, they are almost certainly "polluted" with bad data. We strongly recommend you create new Conversion Actions to use with ClickMagick.

Go to your Microsoft Ads dashboard and click on "Tools", and then find "Conversion Goals"

 

Click on the "+ Create" button to create a new conversion goal.

For the Type, in order for ClickMagick to be able to automatically upload the conversions, you will need to select “Offline” as the option here. 

 

Fill out the rest of the information and make note of the name of the new Conversion Goal you created.
 
   


Step 4 - Integrate your Microsoft account with ClickMagick

Integrate your Microsoft Ads account with ClickMagick by going to Integrations in your user account menu:

 

Once you’ve integrated your Microsoft Ads account into ClickMagick, head to your ClickMagick Project Dashboard, then Tools, then Audience Optimization:

 

You'll be presented with two options - you'll want to select Automatic, which should be selected by default.

Toggle the Enabled switch to “Yes,” and the Default Conversion Action window will pop up automatically (if this is the first time you have configured the automatic configuration)


 

 

We find that most users generally want to optimize for sales, so if that's the case just select the Conversion Goal you want in the Sales column, hit Save, and that's all there is to it.

But know that you can also separately create and optimize for other things like Opt-Ins as well if you want. If you do, just select the appropriate Conversion Actions for ClickMagick Actions and/or Engagements as well.

The Default Conversion Goals allow you to specify a single Conversion Goal for each of Actions, Engagements, and Sales with a single Project. 

If you need to do something more advanced, you’ll want to set up Advanced Rules which you can learn about below:

How do I set up Advanced Rules for Audience Optimization?


Step 5 – Capture and Send Visitor Info with your Microsoft Conversions

To help with ad optimization, you’ll want ClickMagick to send as much data about your conversions as possible.

So if you haven’t already, follow the steps in this article to allow ClickMagick to capture visitor info:

How do I capture visitor info from forms on my site in ClickMagick?

Once you’ve done that, just enable Enhanced Conversions in Microsoft Ads by following these steps:

In your Microsoft Ads dashboard, click on “Conversions” and then “Conversion Goals”:

 

Next, click on the conversion goal you're using.

 

Keep clicking on “Next” until you reach the Enhanced Conversions page. Once you’re there, click on "Turn on Enhanced Conversions” and check the box to agree to the terms of use and privacy policy.

 

After that, just hit “Save and next”, then “Done”. That’s everything set up on the Microsoft side!

Finally, head back to your ClickMagick Project Dashboard, then Tools, then Audience Optimization:

 

Next, hit “Set Defaults” under the Microsoft Ads tab.

 

Finally, click on the “Update Conversion Goals” button to refresh the Microsoft Ads integration and enable support for enhanced conversions.

 

Once you've set this all up, ClickMagick will automatically capture visitor info from your website or online store, and send it along with your conversion data back to your Microsoft Ads account.

At this point you will literally get the best event matching and ad optimization that Microsoft Ads is capable of, using their recommended partner integration method for the Conversions API.


Step 6 – Verify things are working correctly

In Audience Optimization, there’s a detailed log that you can use to verify things are working properly.

Once the log shows that conversions have been sent to Microsoft Ads successfully, wait a bit, then check your new Offline Conversion Goals in Microsoft Ads to make sure they are receiving data from ClickMagick.

Use the UET Tag Helper browser extension or your browser’s developer tools to confirm that your UET Tag is not firing any conversion events from the browser and is only loading normally.

Finally, in Microsoft Ads, verify that your new Offline Conversion Goals are receiving events marked as coming from the API and that no unexpected browser-side conversion events are appearing.

Please note that while we send your conversions to Microsoft in real-time, things are not real-time on their end and it can take anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours for things to be visible on their end.

Article 928 Last updated: 11/27/2025 9:32:10 AM
https://www.clickmagick.com/kb/?article=928