Anastasia Braitsik is a powerhouse in the digital marketing landscape, renowned for her deep expertise in SEO, content strategy, and data-driven analytics. As the industry pivots toward more automated solutions, Anastasia remains at the forefront, championing the need for advertiser control and transparency. With Microsoft Advertising recently rolling out self-serve negative keyword lists, we sat down with her to discuss how this structural change empowers marketers to reclaim their time and refine their targeting. This conversation explores the shift away from administrative bottlenecks toward a more agile, high-performance approach to search engine marketing.
Transitioning from support-ticket-based exclusions to self-serve management changes daily operations. How does this shift impact your team’s agility, and what specific manual workflows can now be streamlined to improve overall campaign efficiency?
Moving away from a support-ticket system feels like finally being handed the keys to your own house after years of asking permission to enter. Previously, my team would identify a problematic search query and then have to wait for a representative to process the exclusion, which could take hours or even days. Now, we can execute changes directly in the user interface the moment we spot a budget-draining trend. This shift eliminates the administrative friction that used to stall our optimization cycles and allows us to focus on high-level strategy rather than chasing ticket updates. It makes our daily workflow significantly more proactive, ensuring that every dollar of our clients’ spend is protected in real-time.
With shared lists supporting up to 5,000 keywords at either the account or campaign level, how should advertisers decide which level to prioritize? Please walk us through the logic of organizing these large-scale lists to prevent over-exclusion while protecting your budget.
The decision to apply a list at the account or campaign level is really about the breadth of the intent you want to block. With a massive capacity of 5,000 keywords per list, we have plenty of room to be thorough, but we must be surgical in our application. I typically prioritize account-level lists for universal “junk” terms—think of words like “free,” “jobs,” or “internships”—that would never be relevant to any of our offerings. However, for specific product lines where a term might be negative for one campaign but a goldmine for another, campaign-level lists are essential. This logical layering ensures we are casting a wide net for budget protection without accidentally suffocating the reach of our most profitable search terms.
Negative match types now function consistently across Performance Max and traditional Search. What are the best practices for applying exact and phrase match formatting in these lists, and how do you monitor their impact on the quality of traffic in automated campaigns?
The technical requirements here are very specific, and missing them can lead to costly errors in traffic quality. You must remember that brackets are required for exact match and quotation marks are necessary for phrase match, while the old hyphen method is no longer the standard here. When we apply these to automated campaigns like Performance Max, the relief is palpable because it brings a level of precision to “black box” systems that were previously harder to steer. We monitor the impact by closely watching the search term reports for a reduction in irrelevant impressions and a corresponding lift in click-through rates. It’s a satisfying sensory experience to see a messy traffic profile suddenly become a streamlined, high-intent funnel after a few well-formatted exclusions.
The ability to edit or export negative lists as CSV files offers a new layer of data portability. How can advertisers use these exports for cross-platform auditing, and what specific steps should they take when removing a list to avoid an immediate spike in irrelevant traffic?
The new CSV export functionality is a game-changer for maintaining consistency across a brand’s entire digital footprint. We can now take a list of 5,000 refined exclusions from Microsoft and use it as a master audit file to ensure our other advertising platforms are equally protected. It prevents us from having to reinvent the wheel every time we launch on a new channel. When it comes to removing a list, you have to be incredibly cautious; doing so without a replacement can result in an immediate, painful surge of irrelevant traffic that can deplete a daily budget in a matter of minutes. We always recommend performing a “shadow audit” where you review the traffic the list was blocking before you hit the delete button, ensuring your replacement strategy is live and ready to take over.
What is your forecast for the future of advertiser control within Microsoft Advertising?
I believe we are witnessing a significant pendulum swing where Microsoft is moving away from purely automated, “trust us” systems and back toward empowering the human expert. We are likely to see even more granular self-serve tools that allow us to peek under the hood of machine learning algorithms. The trend suggests that while AI will continue to handle the heavy lifting of bidding and creative assembly, the advertiser’s role as the strategic pilot is being reinforced. My forecast is that Microsoft will continue to bridge the gap between automation and manual control, proving that the most successful campaigns are those where the machine’s speed is guided by a specialist’s nuanced intuition.
