The Bing Merchant Center (BMC) is used for creating stores and catalog feeds containing information about your products that will be used for creating Shopping Campaigns and Product Ads. In the coming weeks we are releasing multiple improvements to BMC to make managing store and catalog feeds a five-star experience.

Important changes to the BMC feed format

There are some changes to your feed structure to note first, and you'll want to update the rules accordingly. These changes have been made so that you can manage all your feed programs across platforms more seamlessly

Delimiter rules on product_category and product_type columns are changing. Soon we will only be accepting “ > ” (with a trailing and leading space) as a valid delimiter. Any other value will be treated as invalid and we won’t split the terms .

Accept Unicode characters in the ID (merchant product ID) field. Previously the ID column would only accept alphanumeric characters, now we are starting to accept all valid Unicode characters in that

Updating Taxonomy for product_category . We are revising our taxonomy to be in line with your other feed programs. Please take a look at the below links as some of the categories have changed quite a bit. With this revision we will also be supporting IDs instead of string values. For example: The use of “305” will be supported instead of “Electronics > Video > Computer Monitors”

Enhanced BMC functionality

Now, on to the fun! We are enhancing your experience in a number of ways over the next couple of weeks; keep reading to find out what.

1. Status of all the items within your BMC store:

Currently, only catalog level details are shown in BMC, including status of each item within a catalog, and there is not a way to get a holistic picture of the status of all the items within a store, possibly across multiple catalogs.

We are excited to introduce a new graph that allows you to view the status of all items within a store in the coming weeks! Each color in the graph represents one of the following 4 states:

1. Active: the item has been processed and is being served.

2. Rejected: the item has been rejected.

3. Expiring: the item will be expiring in the next 3 days.

4. Awaiting Review: the item is being processed and will be ready to be served shortly.

You will be able to access the status of all ads within a store for the past 30 days. This information is useful for correlating feed changes with ad quality and performance. Keep in mind to update your feeds such that the number of items in the Rejected state are minimized.

In addition to the store level summary, there will also be graphs for the total number of impressions received and the total number of clicks received by all your ads within a store in the past 30 days. Hovering over these graphs will display the exact impression and click counts.

2. Information on historical catalogs and reports

We are expanding the historical data available! Previously, only the last uploaded feed and corresponding reports were available, but you will soon be able to access the past five catalog feeds and corresponding reports. This information is very valuable – for example, dips or spikes in impressions and clicks may be correlated to feed changes and viewing historical feeds and reports makes it easier to analysis the data and improve the quality of your feeds.

The snapshot below highlights the drop down list showing the past five feed uploads and the links to the feed and reports. Selecting one of the catalog feed versions from the drop down will update the links to reports and feeds to correspond to the selected catalog feed version.

Connect with us

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