Microsoft Advertising

Last updated on Jun 05, 2023

Microsoft Advertising, popularly called Microsoft Ads or Bing Ads, is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platform for the Bing and Yahoo search engines. It displays your Ads based on the keywords in a user’s search query on yahoo.com and bing.com. The reports it generates provide detailed statistics about your Microsoft Advertising accounts, campaigns, and Adgroups. The information can help you track finances, measure Ad performance, and adjust settings to optimize your budget or campaigns.

For creating Pipelines using this Source, Hevo provides you a fully managed BigQuery data warehouse as a possible Destination. This option remains available till the time you set up your first BigQuery Destination irrespective of any other Destinations that you may have. With the managed warehouse, you are only charged the cost that Hevo incurs for your project in Google BigQuery. The invoice is generated at the end of each month and payment is recovered as per the payment instrument you have set up. You can now create your Pipeline and directly start analyzing your Source data. Read Hevo Managed Google BigQuery.

Accounts

Microsoft Ads offers two types of accounts:

  • Advertiser (Ad) account. This is the account which holds the data related to your Ads.

  • Manager account, also called Customer account. This account is used to manage the advertiser account(s) and other manager accounts. For example, any external agency you hire to manage your Microsoft Ads account would use this account.

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

Use Hevo’s Microsoft Ads connector to integrate all your Microsoft Ads accounts and replicate the account data into your Destination database or data warehouse for analysis.

Key steps of setting up Microsoft Ads as a Source in your Hevo Pipeline include authorizing Hevo to access the data and selecting the accounts and the objects and reports within these for replication. Read the sections below for details of these tasks.


Core Objects

Microsoft Ads provides a variety of objects to hold your Ad campaign data, some of which may have a hierarchical structure. For example, Account → Campaigns → Ad Groups → Ads → Keywords associated with the Ad, and so on.

Select the objects you want to replicate. During ingestion of the data, the records in these objects are timestamped to avoid full ingestion every time.


Reports

Reports provide the metrics around users, their interaction related details, and the performance of your Ads . During replication, Hevo creates one report per object per account. You can replicate the following critical and popular Microsoft Ads reports. To integrate any other report apart from these, contact Hevo Support at support@hevodata.com.

Report Name Description
Performance Reports Delivery performance reports show the overall effectiveness and cost of Ads and keywords for a specified time period.
Account Performance Report Provides data about long-term account performance and trends.
Ad Group Performance Report Provides data to compare delivery performance statistics by Ad group, campaign, or account attributes rather than at the keyword level.
Ad Performance Report Provides data that helps to determine which Ads lead to clicks and conversions, and which are not performing.
Audience Performance Report Provides comparison data for delivery performance statistics by audience, Ad group, campaign, or account attributes.
Campaign Performance Report Provides high-level performance statistics and quality attributes for each campaign or account.
Destination Url Performance Report Provides the list of landing pages that met audience expectations and potentially resulted in high click-through or conversion rates.
Keyword Performance Report Provides details of keywords that are performing well and those that are not.
Search Query Performance Report Provides information about what your audience is searching for when your Ads are shown.
Product Ad Reports Product Ad Reports offer a closer look at how your Microsoft Shopping Campaigns are performing based on product partition and product offer data.
Product Dimension Performance Report Provides aggregated performance data by product category, custom label, title, and type for a specified time period.
Product Partition Performance Report Provides aggregated performance data by product group and product partition type for a specified time period.
Product Search Query Performance Report Provides insight into what your audience is searching for when your Ads are shown as well as ensure that your product titles are relevant to search queries.
Targeting Reports Targeting Reports help you determine whether your Ads are reaching their intended audiences.
Age Gender Audience Report Provides data to help you discover how your campaigns and Ad groups are resonating with different age groups and genders.
Geographic Performance Report Provides details of where your traffic is coming from: the physical location of the people searching for your Ad or the locations people are searching for.
User Location Performance Report Provides details of where your traffic is coming from, broken out by the physical location and the location people are searching for.

For the complete list of reports offered by Microsoft Advertising and their detailed descriptions, read Report Types.


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. For example, if a report includes impression share performance statistics metric columns, only the non-conflicting attributes along with all possible metrics are replicated. Read Column Restrictions for more information.

Reporting Data Retention Period

Microsoft Ads holds report data for a max of 36 months, and reports are aggregated on daily basis. Therefore, the Historical Load job fetches data for the past 36 months. Read Reporting Data Retention Period.

Data Completeness

Microsoft Ads report data is processed throughout the day and this data undergoing processing is considered as incomplete. It is usually considered complete at the end of the day, when Microsoft Ads has finished processing it.

The report Refresher jobs fetch past two days’ data every 24 hours to ensure that all of the data loaded is complete.

Rate Limits

Microsoft Advertising limits the number of API calls that Hevo can in a given time frame, or the rate at which Hevo can ingest the data. So depending on the API endpoint, Hevo may defer a job by a certain time as soon as the API limit is reached.

  • Core Objects jobs - deferred for 15 minutes.

  • Report jobs - deferred for 60 seconds.

Read Rate Limits.


Limitations

  • Not all Microsoft Ads objects and reports are replicated.

  • Sandbox accounts are not supported.


Revision History

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

Date Release Description of Change
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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