Hash Code 2021 is going virtual

Hash Code, Google’s flagship team programming competition, is back...and fully virtual. Join developers around the world as they grow their coding skills and work to optimize real Google engineering problems.  Registration is open now — and whether you’re just starting your coding journey or consider yourself a programming expert, there are plenty of reasons to be excited about Hash Code 2021: * Solve real Google engineering problems. Hash Code problems are based off of real Google engineering problems. Past problems have covered challenges like automating smartphone assembly and designing the layout of a Google data center. You can check out a full list of previous Hash Code problems in our archive. We recommend using those past problems  and scheduling a practice session with your team to prepare for the Online Qualifications. * Try, try and try again. The beauty of Hash Code is that there is no right answer to any of our questions. The problems for each round are optimization problems, meaning you and your team can submit a solution, optimize it and submit it again. Because there is no right answer, your team can submit multiple solutions during a round. This iterative process is exactly how our engineers work on a daily basis at Google.  * Connect during Covid-19. Hash Code is going fully virtual in 2021. Participating in the Online Qualifications is a great way to connect with friends, peers and the global developer community in a safe way. Everyone who competes will join a team of two to four people. Your team can also choose to join a virtual Hub, an online meetup where teams from the same university, coding club, office or organization can compete alongside one another (check out the map of approved Hubs). If you don’t see your organization, you can apply to organize a Hub for your community. Hash Coders are everywhere, and we can’t wait to see the new connections made all over the globe in 2021. Join in on the conversation now: Meet other Hash Coders, find teammates and stay up-to-date on all the latest Hash Code buzz on our Facebook Group. * Have some fun. One of the best parts of Hash Code is connecting with other members of the community while learning and growing your programming skills. Whether this is your first or fifth time participating in Hash Code, there is something for everyone.  Hash Code 2021 kicks off with the Online Qualifications on Thursday, February 25 at 9:30 a.m. PT and wraps up with the Virtual World Finals in April. Register at g.co/hashcode by February 24 and spread the word! 
https://j.mp/39kdNew

The Microsoft Advertising Partner Awards: Congratulations finalists!

In honor of the powerful partners who help make Microsoft Advertising successful, we’re delighted to announce the finalists for this year’s Microsoft Advertising Partner Awards in the Americas. The Microsoft Advertising Partner Awards will celebrate our Elite and Select partners for the incredible work they’ve done in 2020 across various categories. We have also introduced a new category — the Community Response Award — which celebrates the innovation and invention our partners have demonstrated during this unique time. This year’s Awards theme is “Forward Together,” which points to the importance of partnership, and how we move forward toward recovery and growth. As Microsoft Advertising evolves, these partners are demonstrating the ways in which they go above and beyond to ensure their clients are showing up in all the right places, in the most impactful ways. Elite and Select tier members in the Americas are all invited to join the special virtual Partner Awards on February 25, 2021 at 5:00 PM EST/3:00PM CST/2:00PM PST, when we’ll announce our winners with all the celebration and recognition you’ve come to expect. We saw many outstanding submissions from North America and Brazil this year that once again showcased the truly remarkable work we have come to expect from our partners. Categories and finalists appear below in alphabetical order. Our Global Award winners will be announced during the Elevate Partner Summit on April 21, 2021. If you’re a finalist and would like a badge graphic to announce your finalist status, please reach out to msapartnerawards@microsoft.com. Individual and Team Awards Trailblazer of the Year Awarded to an individual that, in an innovative and engaging way evangelizes Microsoft Advertising and drives Microsoft Advertising brand awareness and affinity internally, as well as in the industry. * Anthony Capetola — Sales & Orders * Francisco Lacayo — White Shark Media * Macki Aycock — OMD * Riyaad Edoo — Mindshare USA   Account Team of the Year Awarded to an exemplary account team or group that partners, engages, and drives Microsoft Advertising revenue growth and feature adoption throughout the year. * Anthem — iProspect * Cornerstone Brands — ForwardPMX * Dentsu (Team Sogni) * Estee Lauder — iProspect * Fast Shop / Savegnago - Raccoon Marketing Digital * General Mills — Mindshare * GSK Consumer Healthcare — CMI/Compas * Humana — iCrossing * Netsertive * Wells Fargo — OMD   Community Response Award This new award category offers recognition to partner organizations or someone within a partner organization that has provided innovative support or services to the industry or the community this year amidst the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. * Hibu * iProspect * Kenshoo * OMD * White Shark Media Company Awards Inclusive Culture & Marketing Award Awarded to the partner who demonstrates the strongest commitment to inclusive practices both culturally within their company and in driving the messaging and importance of developing inclusive marketing campaigns with their clients. * 3Q Digital * Dentsu International * i-Cherry * iProspect * Raccoon Marketing Digital   Rising Star of the Year Awarded to a Select partner that has demonstrated the most accelerated focus this past year with Microsoft Advertising. * Dealer Inspire * KlientBoost * Sales & Orders * White Shark Media * Wickfire LLC   Independent Partner of the Year Awarded to an Elite Independent Partner that engages with Microsoft Advertising in true partnership to deliver success to their clients. This partner demonstrates a unified approach and advocates usage of Microsoft Advertising products and features. * Adlucent * Five Mill * Kenshoo * Raccoon Marketing Digital * Tinuti   Client Partnership of the Year Awarded to a client and their respective partner who has shown excellence in their digital advertising campaigns. This new award takes into consideration revenue, feature adoption and overall collaboration in areas such as marketing, thought leadership and insights. * Abbvie — Spark Foundry * Estee Lauder Companies — iProspect * Mitty Supply — Logical Position * UnitedHealthcare — Horizon Media   Agency Partner of the Year Awarded to the agency partner who has showed excellence in partnership with Microsoft Advertising across the board. Brazil * Cadastra * i-Cherry * Raccoon Marketing Digital Canada * Klick Health * Saatchi & Saatchi United States * iProspect * Mindshare USA   Channel Partner of the Year Awarded to the channel partner who has showed excellence in partnership with Microsoft Advertising across the board. * Logical Position * Sales & Orders * White Shark Media   Congratulations to our finalists in the Americas. Our EMEA and APAC finalists can be found in their regional blogs as well.
https://j.mp/2KdjqTm

Meet the researcher creating more access with language

When you’ve got your hands full, so you use your voice to ask your phone to play your favorite song, it can feel like magic. In reality, it’s a more complicated combination of engineering, design and natural language processing at work, making it easier for many of us to use our smartphones. But what happens when this voice technology isn’t available in our own language?  This is something Google India researcher Shachi Dave considers as part of her day-to-day work. While English is the most widely spoken language globally, it ranks third as the most widely spoken native language (behind Mandarin and Spanish)—just ahead of Hindi, Bengali and a number of other languages that are official in India. Home to more than one billion people and an impressive number of official languages—22, to be exact—India is at the cutting edge of Google’s language localization or L10n (10 represents the number of letters between ‘l’ and ‘n’) efforts.  Shachi, who is a founding member of the Google India Research team, works on natural language understanding, a field of artificial intelligence (AI) which builds computer algorithms to understand our everyday speech and language. Working with Google’s AI principles, she aims to ensure teams build our products to be socially beneficial and inclusive. Born and raised in India, Shachi graduated with a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California. After working at a few U.S. startups, she joined Google over 12 years ago and returned to India to take on more research and leadership responsibilities. Since she joined the company, she has worked closely with teams in Mountain View, New York, Zurich and Tel Aviv. She also actively contributes towards improving diversity and inclusion at Google through mentoring fellow female software engineers.10:25 How would you explain your job to someone who isn't in tech? My job is to make sure computers can understand and interact with humans naturally, a field of computer science we call natural language processing (NLP). Our research has found that many Indian users tend to use a mix of English and their native language when interacting with our technology, so that’s why understanding natural language is so important—it’s key to localization, our efforts to provide our services in every language and culture—while making sure our technology is fun to use and natural-sounding along the way. What are some of the biggest challenges you’re tackling in your work now? The biggest challenge is that India is a multilingual country, with 22 official languages. I have seen friends, family and even strangers struggle with technology that doesn’t work for them in their language, even though it can work so well in other languages.  Let’s say one of our users is a shop owner and lives in a small village in the southern Indian state of Telangana. She goes online for the first time with her phone. But since she has never used a computer or smartphone before, using her voice is the most natural way for her to interact with her phone. While she knows some English, she is also more comfortable speaking in her native language, Telugu. Our job is to make sure that she has a positive experience and does not have to struggle to get the information she needs. Perhaps she’s able to order more goods for her shop through the web, or maybe she decides to have her services listed online to grow her business.  So that’s part of my motivation to do my research, and that’s one of Google’s AI Principles, too—to make sure our technology is socially beneficial.  Speaking of the AI Principles, what other principles help inform your research? Another one of Google’s AI Principles is avoiding creating or reinforcing unfair bias. AI systems are good at recognizing patterns within data. Given that most data that we feed into training an AI system is generated by humans, it tends to have human biases and prejudices. I look for systematic ways to remove these biases. This requires constant awareness: being aware of how people have different languages, backgrounds and financial statuses. Our society has people from the entire financial spectrum, from super rich to low-income, so what works on the most expensive phones might not work on lower-cost devices. Also, some of our users might not be able to read or write, so we need to provide some audio and visual tools for them to have a better internet experience. What led you to this career and inspired you to join Google?   I took an Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course as an undergraduate, and it piqued my interest and curiosity. That ultimately led to research on machine translation at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and then an advanced degree at the University of Southern California. After that, I spent some time working at U.S. startups that were using NLP and machine learning.  But I wanted more. I wanted to be intellectually challenged, solving hard problems. Since Google had the computing power and reputation for solving problems at scale, it became one of my top choices for places to work.  Now you’ve been at Google for over 12 years. What are some of the most rewarding moments of your career? Definitely when I saw the quality improvements I worked on go live on Google Search and Assistant, positively impacting millions of people. I remember I was able to help launch local features like getting the Assistant to play the songs people wanted to hear. Playing music upon request makes people happy, and it’s a feature that still works today.  Over the years, I have gone through difficult situations as someone from an underrepresented group. I was fortunate to have a great support network—women peers as well as allies—who helped me. I try to pay it forward by being a mentor for underrepresented groups both within and outside Google. How should aspiring AI researchers prepare for a career in this field?  First, be a lifelong learner: The industry is moving at a fast pace. It’s important to carve out time to keep yourself well-read about the latest research in your field as well as related fields. Second, know your motivation: When a problem is super challenging and super hard, you need to have that focus and belief that what you’re doing is going to contribute positively to our society.
https://j.mp/3q8njIs

What and chill? The content-streaming consumer journey.

2020 required a lot of behavioral changes on many fronts. Some changes were required while other changes were adaptive, like how consumers are streaming content now more than ever. There are also more compelling choices now for streaming services, and exclusive content on each of these competing services. How consumers search for content and where to watch it Finding content to watch and where to watch it is challenging for some. With varying user experiences for searching for content in each platform, it can be a task for consumers to find what they want to watch right now. They are turning to text search to find content and learn where that content can be viewed; consumers on Bing are searching using queries related to content and streaming services in the same search path. We examined search paths for streaming services and found a strong symbiotic connection between queries related to content and queries related to streaming services. 15% of the queries overall were related to content, while 1 in 3 queries were related to content specifically on mobile devices. Personal computer (PC) and mobile search behaviors are different; however, users are looking for the movie or show and ending up with their last click in their path on a streaming services query in both environments. When users start their search paths with a query related to content, 70% of the paths ended with a click to a streaming service. Technology advancement and increased supply of services are providing a unique opportunity The opportunity continues to grow thanks to increased demand and increased competition to Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Disney+, Peacock, Apple TV+, and others made their debut in the last year, but rather than taking subscribers away from other services, it seems like there was growth for all services mentioned above in 2020. The convergence of 5G technologies along with artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) will open new opportunities and continue to drive demand for data and streaming entertainment. Investment in searches related to content is integral to many strategies as consumers universally search for both: Content searches lead to streaming searches and streaming searches are broadly connected to other queries for streaming services. We have analyzed the connections of queries in paths and discovered communities of queries that show cross-shopping intent for streaming services, and behaviors of content discovery. Change is not coming; it’s here now. Media conglomerates are planning their streaming movie releases and theatrical releases alongside each other. We are now seeing large blockbuster movies being released in theaters and available for streaming on the same day. An entertainment boon is on the horizon and advertisers can take advantage of the volume and insights into audiences on our network through their Microsoft search campaigns and Microsoft Audience Network native campaigns. If you love insights, we have a lot more coming in 2021. Sign up for the biweekly Microsoft Advertising Insider newsletter to get the release of our upcoming 2021 consumer insights report in two weeks and keep up to speed with other vertical and seasonal analyses, tips and tricks, thought leadership, and product updates.
https://j.mp/39m4Tx1

Stadia Savepoint: December updates

It’s time for another update to our Stadia Savepoint series, recapping the new games, features, and changes for Stadia in December. Last month, the Stadia live hangout was hosted by YouTube creators Austin Creed and Katie Wilson and revealed new games and features for players to explore. That included the launches of Outcasters and Submerged: Hidden Depths from Stadia Games & Entertainment within Stadia Pro, as well as the publisher’s new partnership with Thunderful Games. The showcase of Crowd Play beta within Super Bomberman R Online and Dead by Daylight demonstrated how live stream viewers can play alongside creators through YouTube. With the launch of Immortals Fenyx Rising, as well as Super Bomberman R Online becoming free for all players on Stadia, it was a December to remember. Cyberpunk 2077 is now available for purchase on the Stadia store. Let’s not forget Cyberpunk 2077, the long-awaited action role-playing game that launched December 10. With Stadia, players jumped instantly into Night City, without having to wait for patches or downloads. Plus, our Cyberpunk 2077 promotion helped bring the adventure to more TVs with a free Stadia Premiere Edition. December also brought the Ubisoft+ beta to US players, allowing players to link their Ubisoft+ accounts and play their favorite Ubisoft games on Stadia—no Stadia Pro required. Support for more regions is coming next year! Crowd Play beta With Crowd Play beta, YouTube live stream viewers have the chance to jump into the Stadia game they’re watching and play alongside the Creator. Stream directly to YouTube Live stream your gameplay and voice within game chat directly through Stadia to your YouTube channel. Learn how to get started. Play Stadia on iOS Play Stadia games on your iPhone or iPad within our public iOS test by signing in to Stadia.com on your Safari iOS browser and adding the Stadia web shortcut to your home screen (more details). Stadia available now in eight new European countries Now, more players in Austria, Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, and Switzerland can play games on Stadia just by signing up on Stadia.com. New homepage on web The refreshed look of the Stadia Home page makes games easier to find, purchase or claim, or play. Stadia Pro updates * Claim five new games for free with Stadia Pro in January: F1 2020, Hotline Miami, Figment, El Hijo - A Wild West Tale, and Ary and the Secret of Seasons. * Thirty games are still available to play instantly within your Stadia Pro library: PLAYERUNKNOWN’S BATTLEGROUNDS, SteamWorld Quest: Hand of Gilgamech, SteamWorld Dig, SteamWorld Dig 2, SteamWorld Heist, Panzer Dragoon Remake, Crayta, Orcs Must Die! 3, Gunsport, Hitman, Human Fall Flat, SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE, Sniper Elite 4, The Gardens Between, Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek, République, Into the Breach, HITMAN 2, Kine, Monster Jam Steel Titans, Everspace, Secret Neighbor, Outcasters, Submerged: Hidden Depths, Cthulhu Saves Christmas, F1 2020, Hotline Miami, Figment, El Hijo - A Wild West Tale, and Ary and the Secret of Seasons. * There are ongoing discounts for both Stadia Pro subscribers and all players - check out the web or mobile Stadia store for the latest. December content launches on Stadia * Assassin’s Creed Origins * Assassin’s Creed Syndicate * Assassin’s Creed Unity * Chronos: Before the Ashes * Cthulhu Saves Christmas * Cyberpunk 2077 * Destroy All Humans! * El Hijo - A Wild West Tale * Enter The Gungeon * Everspace * Figment * Immortals Fenyx Rising * Into the Breach * Lara Croft and the Guardians of Light * Monster Jam Steel Titans * Outcasters * Outward * PHOGS! * Reigns * Secret Neighbor * SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated * Submerged: Hidden Depths * Unto the End * Valkyria Chronicles 4: Complete Edition * Watch Dogs * Watch Dogs 2 New games coming to Stadia announced in December * Disco Elysium: The Final Cut * Tchia * The Elder Scrolls Online - Gates of Oblivion That’s all for December—we’ll be back soon to share more updates. As always, stay tuned to the Stadia Community Blog, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for the latest news.
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Announcing the Microsoft Advertising Sweepstakes!

Participate in the Microsoft Advertising Sweepstakes for a chance to win prizes like an Xbox Series X game console and digital gift cards for shopping in the new year. It’s easy to enter — simply link a new customer account on Microsoft Advertising, or enroll in the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program and complete the sweepstakes registration between January 1 and February 28, 2021. You can receive additional entries by using Google Import to import campaigns or by creating Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns. The more ways you engage, the more entries you can earn. Prizes will be awarded in March 2021, once all entries are verified and winners are chosen through a random drawing. This sweepstakes is open to agencies, direct advertisers, channel partners, technology partners and supply partners. Here’s how the Microsoft Advertising Sweepstakes works: * Visit our registration page * Choose how you want to earn entries: * Get as many as five entries when you add new client accounts to your agency account with Microsoft Advertising. Get additional details on adding a client account on our support page. If your agency is new to Microsoft Advertising, contact our sales team. You will receive one entry per new account linked between January 1 and February 28, and an additional entry per account if you use Google Import to import your campaigns. Get additional details on linking a client account. If your company is new to Microsoft Advertising, contact us to get started. * Create Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns for one or all of the new customer accounts linked as part of the sweepstakes to gain an additional five entries (one entry per account that has Microsoft Audience Ads campaigns created). * Enroll in the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program and get five entries. The Microsoft Advertising Partner Program helps you get the recognition and rewards you deserve. If you’re already enrolled, just complete the registration form and you will automatically earn five entries into the sweepstakes as a benefit of the partnership. If you're not a member, don't wait — enroll in the Microsoft Advertising Partner Program now. * Make sure to submit your entry form for chances to win great prizes and to get the most from your relationship with Microsoft Advertising. Get started now — the first 20 people to gain a valid entry to the sweepstakes will get a $100 Amazon gift card! Note: The sweepstakes is only available in these regions: U.S., Canada (excluding Quebec), U.K., Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, and Germany. Official prizes: * Grand Prize: Xbox Series X (one device awarded per agency to five agencies in North America and EMEA). * Second Prize: $250 Amazon gift card (awarded to five randomly drawn individuals across North America and EMEA). * Early Bird Prizes: $100 Amazon gift card (awarded to the first 20 individuals to submit valid entries).   See more sweepstakes details, and for additional questions please reach out to partnerwithmsftads@microsoft.com.
https://j.mp/3pTksTx

Just desserts: Baking with AI-made recipes

It’s winter, it’s the holidays and it’s quarantine-times: It’s the perfect recipe for doing a ton of baking. In fact, U.S. search interest in "baking" spiked in both November and December 2020. But being in the AI field, we decided to dive a little deeper into the trend and  try to understand the science behind what makes cookies crunchy, cake spongy and bread fluffy — and we decided to do it with the help of machine learning. Plus, we used our ML model to come up with two completely new baking recipes: a cakie (cake-cookie hybrid) and a breakie (bread-cookie hybrid). (Don’t worry, recipes included below.) We started off by collecting hundreds of cookie, cake and bread recipes. Then we converted all of their ingredients to ounces and whittled them down to a few essential ingredients (yeast, flour, sugar, eggs, butter and a few other things). Next we did a bit of reorganizing, since according to Paul Hollywood, treats like banana, zucchini and pumpkin bread are really more cake than they are bread. Then we used a Google Cloud tool called AutoML Tables to build a machine learning model that analyzed a recipe’s ingredient amounts and predicted whether it was a recipe for cookies, cake or bread. If you’ve never tried AutoML Tables, it’s a code-free way to build models from the type of data you’d find in a spreadsheet like numbers and categories – no data science background required.  Our model was able to accurately tag breads, cookies and cakes, but could also identify recipes it deemed “hybrids” — something that’s, say, 50% cake and 50% bread, or something that’s 50% cake and 50% cookie. We named two such combinations the “breakie” (a bread-cookie — "brookie” was already taken) and the “cakie” (a cake-cookie) respectively.  Being science-minded bakers, we had to experimentally verify if these hybrid treats could really be made. You know, for science. Behold the cakie: It has the crispiness of a cookie and the, well, “cakiness” of a cake. We also made breakies, which were more like fluffy cookies, almost the consistency of a muffin. Sara's first batch of breakies. Beyond just generating recipes, we also used our model to understand what made the consistency of cookies, cakes and breads so different. For that, we used a metric called  “feature importance,” which is automatically calculated by AutoML Tables. In our case, the amount of butter, sugar, yeast and egg in a recipe all seemed to be important indicators of “cookieness” (or cakiness or breadiness). AutoML Tables lets you look at feature importance both for your model as a whole and for individual predictions. Below are the most important features for our model as a whole, meaning these ingredients were the biggest signals for our model across many different cake, cookie and bread recipes: If you find yourself with extra time and an experimental spirit, try out our recipes and let us know what you think. And you can find all the details of what we learned from our ML model in the technical blog post. Most importantly, if you come up with an even better cakie or breakie recipe, please let us know.
https://j.mp/3rWkXOq

Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in December 2020

Rank Performance Graph OS Outage hh:mm:ss Failed Req% DNS Connect First byte Total 1 www.choopa.com Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.270 0.005 0.024 0.024 2 Webair Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.327 0.071 0.141 0.141 3 krystal.uk Linux 0:00:00 0.000 0.255 0.088 0.176 0.176 4 GoDaddy.com Inc Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.409 0.009 0.042 0.044 5 Rackspace Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.466 0.010 0.021 0.021 6 New York Internet (NYI) FreeBSD 0:00:00 0.005 0.556 0.058 0.116 0.116 7 Hyve Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.181 0.077 0.153 0.153 8 CWCS Managed Hosting Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.338 0.082 0.166 0.166 9 ServerStack Linux 0:00:00 0.005 0.251 0.083 0.166 0.166 10 www.dinahosting.com Linux 0:00:00 0.010 0.291 0.094 0.189 0.189 See full table Choopa.com finished 2020 as the most reliable hosting company site in December, with no failed requests and the fastest average connection time. Choopa.com topped the table four times in 2020, more than any other hosting company site, and made a total of eight appearances in the top 10. The hosting provider offers cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation in its own primary facility in Piscataway, New Jersey as well as smaller facilities in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo.
https://j.mp/3pUuLqi

Jumpstarting your January with key product updates

Welcome everyone to 2021! We’re now past the holidays and looking towards what will hopefully turn out to be a much better year than the last (certainly a low bar to clear!) As we put 2020 in the rearview mirror and look ahead, there’s lots to get excited about, from a public health standpoint but also to help further empower you in the digital advertising space. At Microsoft Advertising, our goal is for you to reach the right audience with the right message and the right technology, and here are this month’s key product updates to help you towards that goal. This month’s top story: Platform-wide brand safety protection now expanded to Canada and the UK Back in September, we announced our new US partnership with Integral Ad Science (IAS), the global leader in digital ad verification, to help advertisers achieve their advertising goals while implementing the right guardrails to protect their brand. We’re delighted to share that this partnership has now expanded to Canada and the United Kingdom, offering an additional layer of brand safety protection on the Microsoft Audience Network in those markets at no additional cost. Learn more about the partnership in the September post, and stay tuned for more updates on the rollout of this partnership to other markets. In-market Audience segments now available in new markets You can also reach the right audience through all of our In-market Audience segments, which we talked about back in November when seasonal segments were released in time for the holidays. The latest news with In-market Audiences is that they’re now available in open beta to all European markets (except for Belgium), so you can now reach people ready to buy in even more regions than before. In addition to In-market Audiences, we’ve now also expanded the open beta of Customer Match to all markets (except for the European Union, UK and China), so you can target more high-value customers using your first-party data. For more information on the open beta of these audience betas, contact Microsoft Advertising, and for a list of all the in-market audience segments available, check out our help page. Lastly, in recent months we’ve improved our capabilities with Google Import so that you can now import In-market Audiences, remarketing and Custom Combination Lists from Google Ads (additional audience types like Customer Match will be added in the future). As part of this update improvement, we will now be updating all existing scheduled imports from Google Ads to enable them to import and update audience lists and associations. This enablement will happen by the end of January.     By the end of January, the Audience lists and targets option will be enabled to import In-market Audiences, remarketing and Custom Combination Lists from Google Ads.   New AI-based technologies to help boost your Microsoft Advertising performance On the technology front, Microsoft Advertising has recently built a lot of powerful recommendations for your bids & budgets, keywords & targeting, and ads & extensions. In November we announced how you now have a one-stop shop for the recommendations in all your accounts, and there are now even more tactics to help you boost performance, such as examining what keywords are trending or where to set up conversion tracking. Our AI-based recommendation engines have only gotten more effective with time, so we encourage you all to check out the Recommendations page to get your accounts off to the right start here in 2021.   Each recommendation includes the action you should take, how it’s generated, why it’s recommended, and the estimated performance gain to your manager account. A sneak peek of what’s coming soon to Microsoft Advertising As part of these monthly key product announcements, we now also want to provide you a brief preview of some other exciting technologies in Microsoft Advertising’s roadmap that you’ll be able to take advantage of soon. We’ll have more to share in future posts, but here’s a sneak peek of just a couple new capabilities: * Coming soon to Microsoft Advertising’s automated bidding suite is a new strategy to help your brand get premium visibility and stay on top of the competition: Target Impression Share. This strategy will use artificial intelligence to automatically set bids at auction time with the goal of showing your ad on absolute top of the page, top of the page, or anywhere on the page.   Absolute top of the page: The very first ad that appears on the first search results page. Top of page: In the first set of ads that appear on the first search results page. Anywhere on the page: In any position on the first search results page.   * In the Recommendations page, you’ll soon be able to see your optimization score, which is a score that ranges from 0% to 100% to help indicate how much your account is performing at its full potential. When this is added, your recommendations and associated conversion impact will show how much the optimization score will be increased if you apply the recommendation, so you can better prioritize the actions you want to take.   Get your all-up optimization score and the estimated increase in optimization score across each of your recommendations tabs.   Optimization score is rolling out to some advertisers already, but more of you will be seeing this score at the account level and cross-account level in the future. We hope these updates to help you reach the right audience with the right technology get you off to the right start in 2021, and we look forward to sharing more of these look-back and coming-soon updates throughout the rest of this year. Take care and stay safe everybody! Help us improve Microsoft Advertising Your comments and feedback are integral to our ongoing efforts to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.
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