Bing has announced plans to adopt Upgraded URLs, in a bid to make it easier for advertisers to move their ad campaigns over to the platform from AdWords. The company says that by early May 2015 they will roll out two updates to introduce support for Upgraded URLs. The first update will be to the Google Import feature for both Bing Ads Web UI and the Bing Ads Editor. This change will only be important to advertisers who want to import the data from their AdWords Campaigns over to Bing Ads. When an advertiser transfers their campaigns over from Google AdWords, Bing will reconstruct the Destination URL into a format that the platform is able to understand. It will use the campaigns existing AdWords tracking templates to do this. Those templates can be examined at the account, ad group, campaign or entity level. It will also look at both the final URL and the final mobile URL.
Support for Dynamic Placeholders
The second update will introduce support for dynamic text placeholders inside the advertiser’s destination URL. The placeholders will be limited to a few specific types – including the campaign ID, ad group ID or the keyword ID. If the advertiser tries to use a dynamic text placeholder parameter that is not fully supported, such as feed item, physical location or interest location, then the platform will return an empty value. Bing is looking to improve its support for other parameters in the near future.
Improving the Platform
Over the last few months Bing has been working hard to make its platform as appealing as possible to advertisers, and to help advertisers to move over to the platform from Google AdWords. These changes are good news for all advertisers, and show how competition can improve the paid search space as a whole. While Bing is still not yet as popular a search engine as Google, it is a good advertising option, and one that offers advertisers the chance to extend their reach and to access audiences that are not open to them through Google. It makes sense for marketers to have a presence on both platforms so that they can show their message to as many people as possible, and it is getting easier and easier for advertisers to do exactly that as Bing opens up their advertising platform and standardises the data it can work with.
