Microsoft Ads

Last updated on Feb 05, 2025
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Microsoft Ads, also known as Bing Ads, is a pay-per-click advertising platform for reaching a target audience in the Bing network. It creates ads and displays them as per the user’s search query. Using this platform, you can grow your online presence, track your ad performance, manage finances, and optimize your budgets.

Accounts

Microsoft Ads offers two types of accounts:

  • Advertiser (Ad) account: This account allows you to run your ads and generate reports.

  • Manager or Customer account: This account allows you to create and manage other ad accounts. It also provides you access to reports generated in other ad accounts.

Note: A manager account can be linked to other manager and ad accounts in an infinite hierarchical setup.

Hevo uses the Bing Ads API to ingest data from your Microsoft Ads account. Within this API, Hevo also uses the following:

To ingest the data, you must allow Hevo to access it from your Microsoft Ads account.

Prerequisites

Authenticating Hevo on Microsoft Advertising using OAuth

Microsoft Ads uses OAuth 2.0 to identify Hevo and authorize the request for accessing account data.

Effective June 1, 2022, Microsoft Ads requires multi-factor authentication (MFA) for third-party applications like Hevo that use the Bing Ads API. To set up MFA for your Microsoft account, you must download and install the Microsoft Authenticator app.

Authorizing Hevo on your Microsoft Ads account grants it permission to access the objects and reports. You do not need to configure any additional permissions. Read User Roles and Permissions.

Account Selection

Hevo displays the manager account(s) and ad accounts under it for selection when you configure Microsoft Ads as a Source. To simplify this selection, Hevo does not display the sub-manager accounts.

Note: If an ad account that is linked to multiple manager accounts is selected under even one of those accounts, it is included for replication.

In addition:

  • If you select an ad account, Hevo selects its manager account as well. However, if you deselect a manager account, you cannot select the ad accounts under it.

  • If you select a manager account, Hevo ingests data for all the ad accounts under it. This is valid even if you add another manager account on top of this manager account. However, if you select individual ad accounts, Hevo does not ingest the data for any ad accounts added later to the parent manager account.

  • If you select multiple ad accounts containing the same object, Hevo loads the data for these objects to the same table in the Destination. For example, if two ad accounts contain the customer object, then Hevo loads the data for both accounts to the customer table.

Configuring Microsoft Ads as a Source

Note: The Microsoft Ads authentication process uses pop-ups. To avoid issues while configuring the Source, disable all ad-blocking software.

Perform the following steps to set up Microsoft Ads as the Source in your Pipeline:

  1. Click PIPELINES in the Navigation Bar.

  2. Click + CREATE PIPELINE in the Pipelines List View.

  3. In the Select Source Type page, select Microsoft Ads.

  4. In the Configure your Microsoft Ads account page, do one of the following:

    • Select a previously configured account and click CONTINUE.

    • Click + ADD MICROSOFT ADS ACCOUNT and log in to your Microsoft Ads account to authorize Hevo to read your data.

  5. In the Configure your Microsoft Ads Source page, specify the following:

    configure Microsoft Ads as a Source

    • Pipeline Name: A unique name for the Pipeline, not exceeding 255 characters.

    • Authorized User Account (Non-editable): The email address with which you connected to your Microsoft Ads account.

    • Core Objects: The list of objects that you want to ingest, related to the campaigns in your Microsoft Ads account. Refer to section, Core Objects for the list of supported objects.

      Note: Hevo ingests data for all supported objects, by default.

    • Reports: The report whose data you want to ingest. Refer to section, Reports for the list of supported reports.

      Note: Hevo ingests data for all supported reports, by default.

    • Select Accounts: The Microsoft Ads account(s) from which you want to ingest data. Refer to section, Account Selection to understand how Hevo handles the data in these accounts.

  6. Click CONTINUE.

  7. Proceed to configuring the data ingestion and setting up the Destination.

Data Replication

For Teams Created Default Ingestion Frequency Minimum Ingestion Frequency Maximum Ingestion Frequency Custom Frequency Range (in Hrs)
Before Release 2.21 12 Hrs 30 Mins 48 Hrs 1-48
After Release 2.21 12 Hrs 30 Mins 24 Hrs 1-24

Core Objects

For the core objects, Hevo executes the data ingestion tasks as follows:

  • Historical: No historical tasks are executed for these objects as they mostly include informational data.

  • Incremental: Data for the core objects is ingested through incremental tasks. The Bulk API ingests data for the core objects based on the timestamp. This ingestion position can be changed to up to 90 days from the current day. Incremental tasks have the same frequency as the Pipeline.

    Note: Data for the Account object is fetched as a Full Load in each run of the Pipeline.

Note: Restart the ingestion tasks if you want to include quality score data for the keyword_relevance, landing_page_relevance, landing_page_user_experience, and quality_score fields. These fields are retrieved on every restart of the ingestion tasks.

Reports

For each report, Hevo executes the data ingestion tasks as follows:

  • Historical: Runs once. Fetches data for 36 months in reverse chronological order, to fetch the most recent data first. Once the task completes, its status changes to Historical Load Finished. The historical task’s position cannot be modified. This task can only be restarted. As it retrieves data in reverse order, the date offset displayed keeps moving backward as the task executes. Read Types of Data Synchronization.

  • Refresher: Runs daily. Fetches data for the last 2 days. This duration cannot be modified. The task checks for data in reverse order but it does not show any date offset. Its position cannot be changed. Upon completion, the task is deferred for 24 hours.

  • Incremental: Has the same frequency as the Pipeline. This task fetches data from the current day onwards. The position can be changed up to 36 months from the current day. This job cannot be restarted as it would always start fetching the data again for the current day.

Schema and Primary Keys

Hevo uses the following schema to upload the records in the Destination database:

Data Model

You can replicate both objects and report data from your Microsoft Ads account.

Additional Information

Read the detailed Hevo documentation for the following related topics:

Core Objects

Microsoft Ads provides a variety of objects that contain your ad campaign data, some of which may have a hierarchical structure. For example, the Ads object may occur within the hierarchy of an Account → Campaigns → Ad Groups → Ads → Keywords associated with the ad.

Hevo supports data ingestion for the following objects:

Reports

Reports provide metrics around users, their interaction-related details, and the performance of your ads. During replication, Hevo creates one report per object per account. Hevo supports data ingestion for the following reports. To integrate any report apart from these, contact Hevo Support.

Read Report Types for the detailed list of reports offered by Microsoft Ads.

Report Category Report Name Description
Performance Reports   Contains details of the effectiveness and cost of ads, and keywords for a specified time period.
  Account Performance Report Contains details of the long-term account performance and trends.
  Ad Group Performance Report Contains details of the delivery performance statistics by ad group, campaign, or account attributes rather than at the keyword level.
  Ad Performance Report Contains details of the performance of your ads, such as impressions, clicks, and conversions.
  Audience Performance Report Contains details of the delivery performance statistics by audience, ad group, campaign, or account attributes.
  Campaign Performance Report Contains details of the performance statistics and quality attributes for each ad campaign or account.
  Destination Url Performance Report Contains a list of pages that met audience expectations and resulted in high click-through or conversion rates.
  Keyword Performance Report Contains details of the keywords that are performing well and the ones that are not.
  Search Query Performance Report Contains details of the performance of your ads against the search terms that prompted them to be displayed to an audience.
Product Ad Reports   Contains details of the performance of Microsoft Shopping Campaigns as per the product partition and product offer data.
  Product Dimension Performance Report Contains details of the performance aggregated by product category, custom label, title, and type for a specified time period.
  Product Partition Performance Report Contains details of the performance aggregated by product group and product partition type, for a specified time period.
  Product Search Query Performance Report Contains details of the user searches where your ads are visible.
Targeting Reports   Contains details of how your ads are used to target the desired audience.
  Age Gender Audience Report Contains details of how your campaigns and ad groups are resonating with various age groups and genders.
  Geographic Performance Report Contains details of the source of traffic as per the country, state, city, and radius.
  User Location Performance Report Contains details of the physical location of users who are clicking your ads.

Source Considerations

Report Attributes and Performance Statistics

Report data includes both attributes and performance metrics data. By default, Hevo selects all report attributes and metrics for replication. However, in case of any conflict between these, Hevo replicates only the non-conflicting attributes and all the possible metrics data. Read Column Restrictions to know about the conflicting columns in reports.

Reporting Data Retention Period

Microsoft Ads retains the data in the reports for a maximum of 36 months and aggregates it daily. As a result, Hevo fetches the historical data for the past 36 months. Read Reporting Data Retention Period for more information.

Data Completeness

Microsoft Ads processes the report data throughout the day, and during this time, the data is considered incomplete. It is usually considered complete at the end of the day when Microsoft Ads finishes its processing.

The refresher tasks in Hevo fetch the report data every day, for the past two days to ensure that the data loaded is complete.

Rate Limits

Microsoft Ads limits the number of calls that can be made to its APIs in a time period. This limit ensures that their system remains stable for usage by all users. As a result, depending on the API, if Hevo approaches the limit, it defers the following tasks:

  • Core Object tasks for 15 minutes.

  • Report tasks for 60 seconds.

Read Rate Limits.

Limitations

  • Hevo replicates the data only for some Microsoft Ads objects and reports.

  • Hevo does not support sandbox accounts.

  • Hevo does not load an Event into the Destination table if its size exceeds 128 MB, which may lead to discrepancies between your Source and Destination data. To avoid such a scenario, ensure that each row in your Source objects contains less than 100 MB of data.

Revision History

Refer to the following table for the list of key updates made to this page:

Date Release Description of Change
Jan-07-2025 NA Updated the Limitations section to add information on Event size.
Sep-30-2024 2.28.1 Updated section, Data Replication to change the default ingestion frequency to 12 Hrs.
Mar-05-2024 2.21 Updated the ingestion frequency table in the Data Replication section.
Jun-09-2022 NA Modified section, Authenticating Hevo on Microsoft Advertising using OAuth to add information about multi-factor authentication.
Oct-25-2021 NA Added the Pipeline frequency information in the Data Replication section.
Jul-26-2021 NA Added a note in the Overview section about Hevo providing a fully-managed Google BigQuery Destination for Pipelines created with this Source.
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