Bing Ads Releases Upgraded URLs Globally, Here’s What You Need to Know

August 22, 2016

Last week, Bing announced the release of Upgraded URLs to all ads in all available markets, which is something that advertisers have anticipated since Google debuted the change last year. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Upgraded URLs, below is a summary along with the changes and advantages of using them.

What Are Upgraded URLs?

Many marketers rely on manually adding first and third-party parameters to their URLs to expand tracking capabilities. Prior to Upgraded URLs, if a marketer added new parameters to an existing ad’s destination URL, the ad would need to be reviewed and the statistics associated with the previous ad would be lost. This process resulted in many marketers becoming reluctant to implement new third-party technology that relied on adding a tracking parameter to the URL.

When Google introduced Upgraded URLs last year, the destination URL became obsolete and the new landing page URL’s nomenclature became the “Final URL”. With the addition of the Final URL, which is the landing page people arrive on after clicking the ad, Google also released two new features called custom parameters and shared tracking templates. These features allow paid search account managers to add new parameters to their URLs without having the ad go through the review process.

What’s Changed in Bing Ads?

Bing Ads has adopted the same URL structure and features that Google released. As of last week, Bing Ads released three fields for URLs and their parameters: Final URLs, Shared Tracking Templates, and Custom Parameters. Users have two ways to upgrade their destination URLs:

Using the Google Import function into Bing Ads or Bing Ads Editor
Using the Bing Ads Editor to upgraded all of your ads at once.

It is important to note that Bing Ads will retire the use of destination URLs next year, but that still gives you plenty of time to upgrade.

What Are the Benefits of Upgraded URLs?

Increased character limit:With the addition of the tracking template and new URL structure, the character limit of the URLs has doubled. This provides marketers who use a variety of tracking parameters with additional freedom to track even more, which enhances their optimization and reporting outside of Bing.

Editing freedom:With Bing’s enhanced URL structure, marketers can now have peace of mind when adding new first or third-party parameters as their ads will no longer be “reset” after editing the URL.

Less downtime for ads: Since ads will no longer need to be reviewed (unless you edit the final URL), there is no ad downtime. This allows marketers to make necessary changes, but not lose out on clicks and conversions.

How Does This Relate to DialogTech?

One of the ways DialogTech customers can trigger the display of dynamic phone numbers on their website is by adding a DialogTech URL parameter to their ad’s URL. This is typically only performed if the user cannot benefit from our custom URL parameter functionality, which allows phone numbers to be dynamically displayed based on an already existing URL parameter. The addition of Upgraded URLs globally in Bing Ads ensures that all marketers that need to add a DialogTech parameter can do so without putting their ads through the review process.

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