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Bing Ads Launches Universal Event Tracking For Goal Tracking

Setting the stage for upcoming audience based remarketing capabilities.

Ginny Marvin on October 23, 2014 at 12:52 pm

Today, Bing Ads announced the global launch of Universal Event Tracking to allow advertisers to define and track goals specific to their businesses.

The company also announced that Universal Event Tracking (UET) sets the stage for audience based remarketing scenarios, which will roll out “soon”.

UET will help advertisers understand

Which ad campaigns are most effective based on conversion goals.
Which keywords better lead to conversions and lower bounce rates.
What is the ROI of your advertising dollars.
Which customer segments convert better and are more valuable.
What type of engagement (e.g. bounce rate, pages per visit, duration per visit) your keywords have on your site.

UET replaces the conversion tracking functionality offered in Campaign Analytics. Tags created before July 2013 will stop being supported in April 2015. More recent tags will still be supported, but will be read only in Campaign Analytics. All new tags must be created with Universal Event Tracking.

The tracking follows last click attribution for assigning conversions to specific keyword ad clicks and supports four different types of goals:

Users familiar with setting up goals in Google Analytics, will be comfortable setting up goals in Bing Ads UET.

UET relies on one snippet of code placed on the site, rather than having to have individual tracking codes for different goals. The same code snippet will then support the upcoming audience segments for remarketing as well.

Universal Event Tracking also enables cross-device tracking when Bing Ads “knows that devices belong to the same user”. How does Bing know when devices belong to the same user? You probably guessed it, a user ID. A Microsoft spokesperson told Search Engine Land:

Microsoft is able to recognize the same user across devices by using an anonymous identifier (MSID). The MSID is used to describe a persistent unique identifier used by Microsoft Advertising to deliver targeted ads and recognize the same user across devices and Microsoft services. Customers have a choice to opt out of targeted advertisements that use the MSID by visiting http://choice.microsoft.com/en-us/opt-outand turning off the control that says “Personalized Ads Wherever I use my Microsoft Account”

Microsoft isn’t alone in using IDs for replacing the cookie to track users across devices (Facebook, Google, and others are on this track, too), but I don’t recall Microsoft acknowledging this use for Bing Ads prior to this announcement.

Because the code isn’t placed on conversion pages alone, UET can gather data and can provide insights on engagement metrics such as bounce rate, average pages per visit and average duration per visit at the keyword level.

UET is compatible with major tag management systems such as Google Tag Manager, Adobe Tag Manager, Tealium, QuBit, Signal Digital and Ensighten.

More information is available in the implementation guide.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.