Microsoft Advertising yesterday announced Product explorer, a new interface inside the Microsoft Advertising platform that lets US advertisers see their entire product catalog in a single searchable view, covering which products are active, which are serving, and how each one is performing across a set of standard metrics.

What Product explorer is and who it is for

The feature is currently limited to advertisers in the United States working with fewer than 100,000 stock-keeping units. That SKU threshold is a meaningful constraint. Retailers with large catalogs - think mass-market e-commerce operations with hundreds of thousands of distinct listings - will not yet have access. The restriction suggests the tool is being trialled at a scale Microsoft's system can handle before a broader rollout, though no timeline for expansion has been communicated.

Navah Hopkins, Microsoft Ads Liaison and international speaker, announced the feature today on LinkedIn. Hopkins described Product explorer as "a unified, searchable view of your entire product catalog" that helps advertisers "quickly understand which products are active, serving, and performing." The announcement drew early engagement from the marketing community, with comments from practitioners and the Microsoft Advertising official account within hours of posting.

The context matters. Microsoft Advertising has been adding reporting depth across its platform for the past year, and Product explorer fits that trajectory. Advertisers running shopping campaigns have historically had to rely on campaign-level or ad-group-level data, without a clean mechanism to inspect individual products across their entire feed in one place.

How the interface works

Product explorer gives advertisers two categories of filters: attribute-based filters and performance-based filters. These can be used independently or in combination, allowing practitioners to cross-reference product data attributes against delivery and conversion behaviour.

The attribute side covers a wide set of product fields. Advertisers can filter by title, status, product ID, price, languages, feed label, brand, GTIN, MPN, SKU, product type, category, condition, availability, and custom label. That list maps closely to the standard fields used in product feeds submitted to Microsoft Merchant Center. Feed label, for example, is a field Microsoft introduced to help streamline cross-border and international campaign management, allowing products from different markets to be grouped under a shared identifier. Custom labels are a more flexible field, defined entirely by the advertiser to reflect internal segmentation logic - such as margin tier, seasonality, or promotional eligibility.

The title field offers particularly granular string-matching options. Advertisers can filter by whether a title contains a string, does not contain it, starts with it, ends with it, equals it exactly, or does not equal it. This level of text-matching logic is more precise than typical product listing interfaces, and could prove useful for catching naming inconsistencies at scale.

On the performance side, the tool exposes six metrics for filtering: impressions, clicks, conversions, spend, CTR, and conversion rate. These are the core indicators most search and shopping advertisers use to evaluate product efficiency. Being able to filter the entire catalog by, say, products with more than zero impressions but zero conversions gives a cleaner signal on where budget may be flowing without return.

Results can be exported for offline analysis. The export function is available through the standard Merchant Center product listing interface.

One of the more operationally relevant elements of Product explorer is the Recommended Actions tab. According to Hopkins, this tab surfaces suggestions to help products that have stopped serving get back into delivery. The platform does not yet surface pattern-level recommendations - that is, systemic insight into groups of products consistently underperforming on specific query types. That gap was noted publicly in early comments on Hopkins' announcement, with one commenter describing cross-referencing impressions with custom labels as "the kind of feed health audit I'd pay for."

The Recommended Actions feature sits within a broader pattern at Microsoft Advertising. The platform introduced actionable recommendations for search, shopping, and Performance Max campaigns in October 2024, adding status updates that flag when campaigns are limited by budget or automated bidding targets. Product explorer extends that recommendation logic to the product level.

Feed health and taxonomy auditing

Hopkins outlined three specific use cases for the tool in her announcement. The first involves identifying products that are not serving. By filtering on impressions, advertisers can isolate products that have received no delivery - and then use the Recommended Actions tab to understand why and what changes might restore serving.

The second use case targets feed taxonomy. According to Hopkins, "custom labels, categories, and product types can be really helpful to organize your feeds/campaigns. They also can cause products to serve for incorrect queries." The Product explorer interface is designed to help advertisers detect whether their tagging and categorisation logic is producing unintended query matches. That is a technically meaningful concern. Custom labels are entirely self-defined, which means errors in labelling propagate silently until an advertiser manually checks them. A product classified under the wrong product type, or carrying a custom label that misaligns with a campaign filter, may serve for queries it was never intended to capture.

The third use case is product-level performance review - getting granular efficiency data that supports or challenges what campaign-level reporting shows. Campaign metrics aggregate across many products, which can mask wide variation in individual SKU performance. A campaign showing a healthy blended conversion rate may contain a subset of products generating the majority of conversions alongside a long tail of items consuming spend without converting.

Feed management context at Microsoft Advertising

Product explorer complements existing infrastructure at Microsoft Merchant Center. Microsoft introduced supplemental feeds for Merchant Center in September 2025, giving merchants the ability to update specific product attributes - titles, descriptions, custom labels, size, colour, and promotion IDs - without reuploading entire catalogs. That feature addressed a structural problem: previously, any modification to even a single product field required a full catalog reupload.

Together, supplemental feeds and Product explorer address different layers of the same operational challenge. Supplemental feeds handle the data management side - updating attributes efficiently at scale. Product explorer handles the diagnostic side - identifying which products have problems and whether those problems are attribute-related or performance-related.

The feed label field, visible as a filter in Product explorer, was introduced by Microsoft Advertising in March 2024 to let retailers group products across multiple feeds based on shared characteristics like language, market, or product category. Advertisers selling across the UK, France, and Germany, for example, could create a single feed label spanning all three market feeds and run a campaign targeting that label. Product explorer now makes it possible to filter the catalog by that label and inspect performance at that grouping level.

Microsoft Advertising's expanding product data toolkit

Product explorer arrives as Microsoft Advertising has been systematically deepening its product advertising capabilities over several years. Sponsored Products launched in open beta in 2022, enabling manufacturers to boost individual product visibility within shopping campaigns, with distinct reporting and a cost-split model between manufacturers and retailers. First-party data tools for retailers followed in January 2025, including Curate for Commerce and Sponsored Promotions by Brands - a cost-per-sale model running across Microsoft Edge, Bing, and participating retail sites.

In April 2025, Microsoft launched a merchant program specifically for Copilot shopping integration, encouraging merchants to share structured product specifications to improve matching inside AI-generated responses. That initiative reflects a broader shift in how product data flows into shopping experiences - from structured feed attributes matching keyword queries to machine-readable product data powering AI-generated recommendations.

According to Microsoft's data covering the period from June to August 2024, Performance Max product ads in Copilot experienced a fivefold increase in impressions compared to standard ads, with conversion rates running 63% higher than traditional search ads. Whether those gains reflect AI-powered product matching, audience targeting quality, or format novelty is unclear from aggregate figures alone. What Product explorer theoretically adds is the ability for advertisers to inspect which specific products from their catalog are driving those outcomes.

Microsoft's ad revenue crossed $20 billion as of May 2025, driven in part by Copilot integration and growth in shopping-related formats. The advertising business has since continued to grow, with retail and shopping formats contributing to that trajectory alongside search.

Current limitations

The 100,000 SKU ceiling is the most significant current limitation. For the long tail of smaller retailers and direct-to-consumer brands, the threshold is comfortable. But mid-market and enterprise retailers running broad assortments will find themselves outside the tool's current scope. Whether Microsoft plans to extend the limit - and on what timeline - has not been publicly stated.

The geographic restriction to US accounts is also worth noting. Microsoft Advertising operates across dozens of global markets, and feed management challenges are not unique to US advertisers. Retailers running international campaigns through Microsoft Merchant Center, particularly those who have adopted supplemental feeds or feed labels for cross-border campaigns, will not yet have access to this catalog-level visibility.

The tool is described as live in US accounts as of today and actively collecting feedback. Hopkins noted: "We're actively taking on feedback on how we can improve and expand." That framing suggests the current release is deliberately limited in scope, with the expectation that advertiser input will shape future development. The feedback loop mechanism is the Microsoft Advertising standard interface rather than a separate beta program.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For practitioners managing shopping campaigns on Microsoft Advertising, the operational significance is in the diagnostic capability. Feed quality is a persistent variable in shopping campaign performance. Products can disappear from serving for reasons that are not immediately visible - feed validation errors, attribute mismatches, policy issues, or simply missing data. Campaign-level reporting does not surface these gaps clearly; it reflects what is serving, not what is not.

Product explorer gives a clearer picture of the gap between what is in the catalog and what is actually running. The ability to filter by impressions - and specifically to identify products with zero impressions - creates a simple diagnostic pathway. Zero-impression products with active status point toward feed or policy issues. Zero-conversion products with impressions point toward bid, landing page, or audience relevance issues.

The tool also has utility for feed taxonomy audits. Advertisers who have built complex custom label hierarchies, or who manage product types across multiple categories, can now inspect how those taxonomies map to actual serving behaviour. The question of whether a given custom label is causing products to serve for unintended query types is not easy to answer with standard campaign reporting. Filtering the catalog by custom label and then reviewing impression data gives a practical proxy for that question.

The export function extends the analysis to offline environments, where advertisers can cross-reference the Product explorer output with their internal product data, ERP systems, or pricing databases.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Microsoft Advertising, announced by Navah Hopkins, Microsoft Ads Liaison and international speaker.

What: Product explorer, a new catalog management interface inside the Microsoft Advertising platform. It provides a unified, searchable view of all products in an advertiser's catalog, with filtering by 15 product attributes and 6 performance metrics, a Recommended Actions tab for restoring non-serving products, and an export function for offline analysis.

When: Announced today, June 16, 2026, through a LinkedIn post by Navah Hopkins.

Where: Available in US Microsoft Advertising accounts for advertisers managing fewer than 100,000 SKUs, accessible through the existing Merchant Center product listing interface.

Why: Advertisers managing shopping campaigns have lacked a consolidated view of product-level data within the Microsoft Advertising platform, making it difficult to diagnose which products are not serving, identify feed taxonomy issues, and correlate product attributes with performance outcomes. Product explorer addresses that gap for US retailers operating at sub-100,000 SKU scale.