Microsoft Advertising has expanded its testing toolkit for Performance Max, giving advertisers a formal way to check whether the automated campaign type is worth the switch. The rollout opened as a beta, meaning it currently requires a direct request rather than automatic access. Navah Hopkins, the Microsoft Ads Liaison, announced the update on LinkedIn, describing two distinct experiment formats now available.
The first format, an upgrade experiment, lets an advertiser pit a newly built Performance Max campaign against an existing one, or run it in parallel with other active campaigns. The comparison shows whether switching to Performance Max produces better results than the campaign structure already in place.
The second format targets a harder problem: incrementality. This experiment splits users into a treatment group that sees the ads and a control group where the ads are suppressed, then tracks the difference in conversions over a minimum of six weeks for eligible campaigns.
That distinction matters more than it might appear. Automated bidding systems like Performance Max are frequently credited with conversions from users who searched a brand name, clicked a shopping ad, or would have converted through another channel regardless of exposure. Advertisers have voiced this concern for years without a native tool from Microsoft to test it directly. An uplift experiment gives them a mechanism to isolate genuine incremental conversions from ones the platform would have claimed anyway.
The addition also closes a longstanding gap with Google Ads, where advertisers have run similar conversion-lift and campaign-comparison experiments for Performance Max campaigns since the format’s earlier rollout. Microsoft’s beta effectively brings Bing’s automated campaign type to feature parity on measurement, not just on campaign mechanics.
Search Engine Roundtable, which first reported the beta, noted that advertisers must contact a Microsoft Advertising chat representative to request access rather than opting in through a self-serve toggle. That manual gate suggests Microsoft is controlling the rollout pace, likely to manage data quality and support load as more advertisers query the six-week test window.
For search marketers, the practical value sits in sequencing. An upgrade experiment tells you whether Performance Max beats what is running today. An uplift experiment tells you whether those wins are real or borrowed from conversions that would have happened anyway. Teams currently running or considering Performance Max on Microsoft Advertising should request beta access and prioritize the uplift test first: a campaign that wins the upgrade comparison but fails the incrementality check is not actually generating new revenue, just reallocating credit.
Search Engine Roundtable’s Barry Schwartz reported the beta on July 3, 2026, citing Microsoft Ads Liaison Navah Hopkins.
