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Bing Ads To Retire Explicit Mobile OS Targeting In March 2015

Move will complete the transition to compatibility with AdWords enhanced campaigns.

Ginny Marvin on November 7, 2014 at 11:06 am

To complete its path to compatibility with Google AdWords, Bing Ad has announced that explicit OS targeting will be retired in March of next year.

No longer will you have the option to target ads to a specific mobile operating systems as you are now.

OS targeting available in Bing Ads today.

Instead, what advertisers will see beginning in March 2015 is this:

Device targeting in Bing Ads starting March 2015.

This change rounds out Bing Ads’ adoption of Google’s enhanced campaigns. After showing some initial bravado when Google announced it was taking away tablet targeting from advertisers, Bing Ads backed down from that stance and decided it was better to join ’em.

The effort to bring parity between the two platforms has been underway throughout this past year, with the thinking being that advertisers will be willing to spend more time in Bing Ads if they don’t have to learn how to navigate and manage campaigns in a completely different environment from the one they spend most of their time in, namely AdWords. In September, the ability to bid separately on tablet traffic was removed and, as on AdWords, desktop and tablet traffic is now combined. However, Bing Ads did give advertisers a concession here by providing a bid modifier on tablets, something that Google does not provide in AdWords.

At the same time, Bing Ads announced that App Extensions will roll out just as the explicit OS targeting goes away.

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.