Ever since we first launched Universal Event Tracking, we have been carefully listening and continuously incorporating your feedback into our product. As part of this ongoing effort, we are thrilled to announce major improvements to conversion tracking in Bing Ads. Today, we have something for everyone...

If you are not yet tracking conversions using Bing Ads, we are confident that the simplified workflow and comprehensive documentation will make it very easy for you, as a first time user, to understand how it works and get started.

Those of you that are still using legacy Campaign Analytics tags will be excited to know that we have added several parity features and other functional enhancements that will ease your transition to UET.

Last but not least, we have made life a lot easier for those that are already using UET for conversion tracking by addressing most of the pain points that you have reported to us over the last few months.

We deeply value your feedback -- please, keep it coming; we're just getting started!

How conversion tracking works for you

Your business is advertising on Bing; people are clicking your ad and visiting your website. What do they do next? How many make a purchase? Is your advertising and web site helping you reach your business goals?

We can answer these questions using Universal Event Tracking (UET), a tracking tool that records what your customers are doing on your web site. By installing a single tag across your web site, you can begin collecting data on your visitors' activity while there. To set up a UET tag, visit How to Create a UET Tag.

Once you set up UET, you can then begin the process of Conversion Tracking; tracking the number of times visitors to your site “convert” into your business goal a the result of clicking your ad – for example, by making a purchase or contacting you for more information. You can tell Bing Ads which actions users take to count as conversions by setting your conversion goals, as detailed in Track Conversions and Site Goals.

After you’ve spent some time accumulating and examining your new conversion data, you may want to capitalize on opportunities to improve your results and raise the return on investment (ROI) of your campaign. Remarketing (coming soon) is a powerful new audience targeting tool that helps you do just that – specifically, by enabling you to reach visitors of your web site after they’ve left. Remarketing works in conjunction with UET and Conversion Tracking to help you go the extra mile in reaching your business goals.

Now that you understand the importance of conversion tracking and UET in running a strong and successful campaign, here are the ways we’ve made these tools better so that you can be successful sooner.

What's new today?

Your feedback since the initial launch has directly shaped this release by focusing our work on two fronts: workflow and ROI. At the end of the day, conversion tracking should be easy to use and it should help you achieve a higher ROI. Let’s look at what’s new in that regard.

Workflow improvements for speed and simplicity

You told us that the workflow involved in setting up UET and Conversion Tracking was confusing and time consuming. In response, we’re releasing the following solutions to make the process simple and seamless:

1. Decoupled management of UET Tags and Conversion Goals - Functionality to manage both UET tags and Conversion Goals was previously embedded in Goals and Conversions page under Shared Library. There was no way to create a tag without creating a conversion goal or view all the tags created in a centralized manner.

In this release, we have decoupled UET Tag and Conversion goal management into separate pages, UET Tags and Conversion Goals, respectively. In order to improve discoverability, these two new pages are listed under a new node called Conversion Tracking that has been added to the left menu (at the same level as Shared Library).

2. Better Revenue tracking - Bing Ads allows you to track revenue associated with your conversions. Today’s update gives you more control and insight into your options for doing so and makes it easier to understand overall.

3. Inline Alerts – Who can remember everything all the time? That’s why we created instant inline alerts -- a gentle reminder of your next steps that help you along the way. For example, when you create a custom event type goal, we will remind you of the need to customize UET tag tracking code to report custom events.

4. Help – We have added several help popups -- noted with a symbol -- throughout the UI to make sure you never feel stuck. We’ve also given the help documentation for UET and Conversion Tracking a complete makeover, making it your comprehensive new one-stop-shop for all your questions.

New features to supercharge your ROI

The more you know, the more empowered you are to make the right decisions to achieve your goals. That’s why we’ve added the following solutions for strengthening your campaign’s performance:

1. Support for Unique conversions – With this update, we're introducing the flexibility for you to count conversions according to your business needs. When you are creating a conversion goal, there will be 2 options available to you for the Count property...

a. All Conversions – If you use this setting, Bing Ads will count all conversions that happen after a click. If you are tracking purchases as conversions, this is a good option to use.

b. Unique Conversions – With this setting, Bing Ads will count only one conversion that happens after a click. Pick this option if you want to track the number of unique leads generated on your website as a conversion.

All your existing conversion goals will be defaulted to All conversions. You will be able to edit those goals to update them to Unique conversions.

2. Account level conversion goals – Starting today, you will have the option to specify if a conversion goal is at the account scope or across all accounts via the new Scope property.

If you manage multiple accounts, running campaigns that all send users to one web site when they click on your ads, you should set Scope property to "Across all accounts." If different accounts lead users to different web sites, you should set the Scope property to the current account in context so that conversions that happen on different website are correctly tracked and attributed to clicks from their corresponding accounts only.

All your existing conversion goals will have the scope of "Across all accounts." We do not allow edit of the scope property; please create a new conversion goal if you are looking to set up account level goals.

3. Tracking Status of UET Tags and Conversion Goals - You can now verify in the Bing Ads UI if your tags and goals are functional. The tracking status column has been added to both the UET Tags page and the Conversion Goals page to let you know if your tags are reporting user activity and if goals are counting conversions, respectively.

Learn more about the different values for the UET tag and Conversion Goal tracking statuses and what they mean.

a. UET Tags page

b. Conversion Goals page

4. Conversions, Revenue and Repeat Rate data in Conversions goals page – You can now see the number of Conversions, Revenue and Repeat Rate (defined as All Conversions/Unique conversions) for each conversion goal that you have created right in the Conversion Goals page. Use the date range selector to view data for different time periods.

5. Support for Contains clause in Destination URL and Custom Event type conversion goals – To make it easy for you to define conversion goals based on a the presence of a string in the URL visited by the user on your web site, we have introduce the support for "Contains" clause. You can see this option when creating a conversion goal of type Destination URL and Custom Event. This should reduce or eliminate the need for using regular expressions in your conversion goals.

6. Removal of infrequently used columns from performance reports – To improve the ability of our platform to provide you conversion related reports in a timely manner, we are eliminating a number of columns from conversion-related performance reports which were rarely used, but expensive to generate. Specifically, we are eliminating the Bounce rate, Avg pages/visit, Total visits and Avg. visit duration metrics from performance reports. In addition, we are also removing the Spend and ROAS columns from the Goals report.

A reminder about campaign analytics

With these updates, conversion tracking powered by UET provides a superset of the functionality of our deprecated Campaign Analytics offering. We’d like to remind you that Campaign Analytics will be shut down in the coming months and we strongly recommend that you migrate over to UET based conversion tracking as soon as you can.

Connect with us

We're always looking for feedback on how we can improve our product to help you do more and work less. We invite you to ping us on Twitter, suggest a feature on the Bing Ads Feature Suggestion Forum, or send us an email with your thoughts to: bingads-feedback@microsoft.com.