Microsoft Advertising on May 7, 2026, expanded the reporting capabilities of its Performance Max campaigns, adding conversion data, clicks, and spend metrics to the Website URL publisher report - a move that takes the platform beyond what most comparable cross-channel campaign formats currently offer advertisers.

The update was announced by Carolyn Chou, Director of Product Management at Microsoft Advertising, in a post published to the Microsoft Advertising blog. It arrives as the broader advertising industry continues to grapple with a persistent question: when automated campaigns make the placement decisions, how much can advertisers actually see?

What changed in Performance Max reporting

Most placement reports for cross-channel campaign types stop at impressions. According to the announcement, Microsoft's Website URL report now goes further, surfacing conversions, clicks, and spend at the placement level. The stated aim is to give advertisers a fuller picture of which specific websites are contributing to measurable results, rather than limiting visibility to raw impression counts.

This distinction matters more than it might initially appear. Impressions tell an advertiser that an ad was displayed. Conversions and spend together reveal whether the budget deployed on a given placement is producing returns - or not. Without that breakdown, optimization decisions on automated campaign types like Performance Max have historically relied on aggregate campaign-level data rather than granular site-level evidence.

Microsoft positions the update as more complete than what industry alternatives currently provide. According to the blog post, the expanded metrics make it "easier to see which placements are driving results and optimize PMax campaigns with greater confidence."

The 8% incremental conversion figure

Microsoft cited internal data in the announcement, noting that advertisers using Performance Max on Microsoft Advertising see an average 8% increase in incremental conversions. The data covers the period from September 2024 to September 2025, sourced from Microsoft's own global measurement.

That figure provides a baseline context for why the transparency push is happening now. As more advertisers shift budget toward Performance Max - drawn by the cross-channel optimization and the AI-driven placement logic - the demand for visibility into how that budget is being deployed grows proportionally. The 8% lift is the carrot; the expanded reporting is the means to verify whether it is being realized across individual placements.

It is worth noting that earlier data published by Microsoft had shown even sharper performance differences. Results from 2024 indicated that combining Performance Max with search campaigns could reduce cost-per-acquisition by 32% and triple return on ad spend. An October 2024 analysis found Performance Max campaigns delivering 4.2 times more conversions alongside Copilot integration.

How placement exclusions fit into the picture

The announcement includes specific guidance about what to do - and what to avoid - once advertisers have access to the fuller placement data. According to Microsoft, advertisers can exclude placements that appear unsuitable for their brand via URL exclusion lists at the account level.

But the guidance also contains a caution about over-indexing on short windows of data. According to the blog post, placement-level figures reflect how the system is exploring and learning to drive conversions, and Microsoft recommends evaluating performance over several weeks or full conversion cycles rather than reacting to brief snapshots.

The tension here is real. Advertisers who receive richer data naturally want to act on it. Microsoft's position is that frequent manual exclusions can interfere with the platform's ability to learn, potentially blocking placements that would have eventually produced results. That framing will be familiar to anyone who has worked with AI-optimized campaign types across platforms - the algorithmic logic often runs on longer time horizons than human intuition tends to apply.

This concern connects to a broader context. Microsoft launched enhanced website exclusion tools in August 2025, introducing bulk management capabilities for up to 10,000 domains per list across Audience and Search campaigns. The current update extends the data layer that informs those exclusion decisions for Performance Max specifically.

Landing page and search term reporting

The May 7 update also references two reporting features that Microsoft had announced in an April blog post: landing page reporting and search term reporting for Performance Max.

Landing page reporting operates at the URL level. According to the announcement, it helps advertisers verify that final URL expansion - where the system automatically selects landing pages across a website - is routing traffic to relevant pages. If a mismatch is identified, advertisers can apply URL rules or custom labels to restrict the system's behavior and direct traffic toward specific pages.

Search term reporting provides visibility into the queries that drove traffic to the site. This is a capability that has expanded gradually across Microsoft's campaign types. Microsoft first introduced search term insights reports for Performance Max in September 2024, providing data on the search queries that triggered ads within a selected timeframe, grouped into categories alongside key performance metrics. The October 2024 roundup of platform updates confirmed the feature was live across campaign types.

According to the May 7 announcement, search term reporting is currently rolling out for Performance Max in the coming weeks, separate from the search term insights feature that is already available.

What is coming next: auction insights for Performance Max

Perhaps the most significant item in the announcement is what it previews rather than what it delivers. Microsoft confirmed that auction insights for Performance Max are coming soon.

According to the blog post, the feature will build on existing impression share metrics by showing how campaigns perform relative to competitors. Specifically, it will surface where advertisers are winning visibility, where competitors are outranking them, and how often campaigns appear alongside competitors - using metrics like overlap rate and outranking share.

This type of competitive intelligence has existed for standard Search campaigns for years. Its absence in Performance Max has been a consistent friction point for advertisers trying to understand why performance fluctuates. Microsoft introduced share of voice metrics for Performance Max in January 2026, providing impression share data with historical figures extending back to November 10, 2025. Auction insights will go further, layering in competitor context rather than only showing absolute impression share figures.

The combination of placement-level conversion data, search term visibility, and competitive auction data represents a meaningful shift in how much advertisers can interrogate Performance Max results from within the Microsoft Advertising interface itself.

Custom columns expand across all campaigns

Beyond Performance Max, Microsoft used the May 7 post to announce a broader reporting update: custom columns in Microsoft Advertising now support all conversion metrics.

Custom columns allow advertisers to construct their own calculated metrics within the reporting interface, combining standard columns through mathematical formulas. The previous limitation was that not all conversion data was available as a building block for those calculations. According to the announcement, that restriction has been lifted, meaning advertisers can now create metrics tailored to their specific measurement frameworks across all campaign types.

This is useful for any advertiser whose conversion model does not fit neatly into Microsoft's default reported metrics. An advertiser weighting certain conversion actions more heavily than others, or building blended metrics that combine revenue and engagement signals, now has access to the full conversion data set when constructing those custom views.

The broader transparency push

The May 7 update is not isolated. It fits inside a sustained pattern of Microsoft adding visibility tools to Performance Max since the campaign type launched globally in early 2024.

The progression has been incremental. September 2024 brought search term insights reporting and the initial pilot of AI-driven search themes. October 2024 added brand exclusions and URL rules at the asset group level. August 2025 introduced enhanced website exclusion tools with bulk domain management. January 2026 added share of voice metrics for Performance Max and expanded the search theme limit to 50 per campaign.

Google has followed a similar trajectory on its own Performance Max product, introducing channel-level performance data in API version 23 in early 2026, following earlier placement view reporting introduced in API version 18 in October 2024. The parallel development paths across the two platforms reflect similar pressure from advertisers demanding accountability from automated systems.

The clarification Microsoft released in December 2025 about exact match keyword priority over Performance Max in auction mechanics is another piece of the same pattern - giving advertisers clearer rules of the road for how their various campaign types interact, rather than leaving those mechanics opaque.

Why this matters for the marketing community

Automated campaign formats depend on advertiser trust. That trust has been difficult to extend without data. When a system selects placements, adjusts bids, expands URLs, and decides which creative assets to show - all without direct human instruction at each step - the ability to audit those decisions after the fact becomes the primary mechanism for accountability.

The Website URL report update gives advertisers one of the most direct views yet into where Performance Max money is actually going and what it is producing at the site level. Combined with the upcoming auction insights feature, Performance Max on Microsoft Advertising will carry substantially more measurement infrastructure than it did twelve months ago.

The marketing community's interest in this development is practical rather than theoretical. Agencies managing multiple advertisers need to demonstrate placement-level return on spend to clients. In-house teams making budget allocation decisions benefit from understanding which parts of a cross-channel campaign are generating the conversions and which are consuming budget without measurable return. The May 7 update addresses that directly.

Microsoft noted that further updates are expected in the next Microsoft Advertising roundup, scheduled for later in May. The company is encouraging feedback through its advertising feedback portal and in-product feedback mechanisms.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Microsoft Advertising, announced by Carolyn Chou, Director of Product Management. Affects advertisers running Performance Max campaigns across Microsoft's advertising inventory.

What: Microsoft Advertising added conversions, clicks, and spend metrics to the Website URL publisher report for Performance Max campaigns. The update also includes landing page reporting and rolling search term reporting. Custom columns now support all conversion metrics across all campaign types. Auction insights for Performance Max - showing competitive overlap rate and outranking share - are announced as coming soon.

When: The announcement was published on May 7, 2026. Search term reporting for Performance Max is rolling out over the coming weeks. Auction insights do not have a confirmed release date.

Where: Available within Microsoft Advertising across its global advertising network, which includes Bing search, the Microsoft Audience Network, MSN, Outlook, Microsoft Edge, and Microsoft Casual Games.

Why: Advertisers using automated campaign types have consistently asked for more visibility into where their budgets are being deployed and which placements are producing measurable results. The update addresses that demand by extending placement-level reporting beyond impressions to include the conversion and spend data needed to evaluate site-level performance.

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