Microsoft Ads Integration Guide

Requirements

Microsoft Ads Integration activation guide

  • Within Microsoft Ads, go to Tools > Conversion tracking > Conversion goals
  • Click on ‘+Create conversion goal’
  • Select ‘Website’
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • Select ‘Purchase’ as Goal Category
  • Select ‘Event’ as Goal Type
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • Give the event goal a name, e.g. ‘Affiliate Conversion’
  • Select ‘Conversion action value may vary’ and set the value to “0”
  • You can ignore the warning ‘You’ll need to customize your UET tag tracking code to report variable revenue’, you won’t need to customise any tracking code
  • Go to Advanced Settings
  • Under Count select ‘All’
  • Use 90 days as conversion window
  • Select ‘Include in “Conversions”
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • Select your UET tag
  • Under ‘Do you have this UET tag installed on your website?’ select ‘Yes…’
  • If you have not placed the UET tag on the website please make sure to at least place it on a page and keep it there in order for the TAG to stay active, if the UET tag is not frequently loaded it will be identified as inactive after a few days.
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • On the Install event tag section please select “Manual Installation”
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • Adjust Action to ‘Equals to’ “wct-conversion” (as you can see in the screenshot)
  • Select ‘Track event on inline action’
  • Click on ‘Next’
  • Then click on ‘Done’
  • After the conversion goal is created go to “Tools” and “Conversion Goals”
  • Scroll left in your goal details until you find the “Tag ID”
  • Copy and paste the Tag ID in your wecantrack website settings
  • After click “Save” 
  • Activate the Microsoft Ads Integration feature in wecantrack under Features

Microsoft Advertising Integration Guide Video

How to activate auto-tagging & automatic UTM parameter placements?

If you want your Microsoft Ads campaign data to also be reflected within our dashboard to for example analyse performance of keywords  and campaigns you need to make sure that you activate the UTM placements within the auto-tagging setting.

  • Go to Tools > Preferences
  • Click on ‘Edit account settings’ (on the right within Account Settings)
  • Scroll down to ‘Auto-tagging’ and click on ‘Account level options’
  • Make sure to enable ‘

How does the iOS17 update impact ad campaigns?

The iOS17 update strips the click id parameters from Google Ads, Microsoft Ads and Meta Ads (called gclid, fbclid and msclkid) from URLs for private Safari sessions, iMessage and iMail on mobile and tablet devices. These click ids are relevant to import / track conversion data in these ad platforms, without them the ad platforms are not able to attribute the conversion data and will thus discard them.

How can you still track your campaign performance?

  1. Utilising UTM parameters

Since private Safari mobile sessions also block Google Analytics, you will not be able to track campaign performance for these private sessions via UTM parameters in Google Analytics. But, iOS does not block wecantrack (at least not at this point), so by using UTM parameters you will still be able to track your private Safari sessions within the wecantrack dashboard and reports.

  1. Utilising wecantrack’s clickid fallback parameter (utm_mid)

You can define fallback parameters in your Google Ads and Microsoft Ads tracking templates which will not get removed by Safari and can be used by wecantrack to still integrate conversion data coming from private mobile Safari sessions on server side. The parameters are called utm_gid for Google Ads and utm_mid for Microsoft Ads.

How to track direct linking Microsoft Ads campaigns?

If you are are placing your affiliate URLs as tracking templates in your Microsoft Ads campaigns we can also help you to integrate their conversions in Microsoft Ads. In order to accomplish that you will need to create a Microsoft Ads Conversion Event just like we explained before.

Make sure to include the MSCLKID variable in a subid parameter of the affiliate URL in the following way:

				
					https://affiliateurl.com/?abc=xyz&subid=msclkid({msclkid})
				
			
Frequently Asked Questions
The simplest way is to have your UET tag placed on your website. Else, you will have to place your UET tag on a page and generate sessions where the UET tag will load. This way Microsoft Ads will verify the UET tag. With the UET Tag Helper you can check if the tag loaded correctly. It is possible to remove it again afterwards but you will then have to frequently go through the verification process to keep it active. We recommend to have the UET tag active on at least one page that frequently receives some traffic.
wecantrack pushes the conversion to Microsoft Ads close to real time. The integration process within Microsoft Ads usually takes a couple of hours but can also take up to one day.
You can set your own tracking templates but when you make use of Microsoft Ads Auto-tagging functionality, they will already place UTM parameters in your landing page URLs, so you won’t have to adjust your tracking template unless you want to change the values that will be used.
Yes, usually UET tags get set up on website level, meaning you use one UET tag per website. It is even possible to use the same UET tag for multiple websites though. Using the same UET tag for the tracking of different products or niches will not impact optimisation or targeting functionalities since these are based on attributed conversion data.
Microsoft Ads attributes the conversion data to the click data and thus to click dates. Because of that, their standard ‘Conversion’ and ‘Revenue’ columns report the conversions on the dates when the clicks occurred, not on the actual order dates.
By standard we have filters in place that prevent conversions with 0 commission amount to be integrated, since most users do not want that. If you want us to adjust your account’s filter please let us know, we will be happy to remove the 0 commission filter.