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 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})
Important information about Microsoft Ads audiences

It has come to our attention that numerous Microsoft Ads advertisers have seen a significant increase in impressions and clicks. However, this additional traffic is often of low quality which does not generate many conversions, thus increasing CPA tremendously and often resulting in affecting the profitability of campaigns.

Our investigation has revealed that this is most likely the result of an update Microsoft Ads recently had, which now incorporates in-market audiences into search campaigns. This has the unintended consequence of bringing in low-quality traffic, as well as significantly increasing advertiser spending while hardly delivering conversions.

To mitigate this issue, we advise taking the following steps: carefully review your campaigns to determine if they have been affected, and if necessary, exclude the in-market audience from your Microsoft Ads search campaigns.

How to view in-market audiences in your campaigns
  • In order to view if your campaigns are now targeting in-market audiences, you can segment your campaigns by Network.

As you can see below, the search campaigns are now targeting and including an “Audience” which significantly increased the number of impressions and clicks, while resulting in a extremely high CPA.

Note: if you have an MCC account you can also filter this on account level and you can find the total network segment performance instead of breaking it down by campaign.

How to exclude in-market audiences

You can go to each individual campaign settings and exclude the audience. Here are the steps you have to follow:

  • Go to your campaign settings and navigate to the section “Audience Ads”.
  • Here you can decrease the bids 100% and it will exclude the audience from your campaigns.

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.
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