Bing, Growing its Appeal with Universal Event Tracking

Last week Bing announced the launch of Universal Event Tracking (UET) to allow advertisers to effectively define and track their business goals.

About Universal Event Tracking

According to Bing, UET will help advertisers understand:

• Which ad campaigns are most effective based on conversion goals.
• Which keywords lead to more conversions and lower bounce rates.
• What is the ROI of your advertising dollars.
• Which customer segments convert better and are more valuable.
• What type of engagement (e.g. bounce rate, pages per visit, duration per visit) your keywords have on your site.

UET has replaced the conversion tracking functionality offered in Campaign Analytics, meaning all tags created before July 2013 will stop being supported as of April 2015 and more recent tags will be supported as read only. All tags created from this point forward will be created with Universal Event Tracking.

Compatibility and Flexibility

“The previous conversion tracking script didn’t necessarily work with all the tag management solutions that were out there and any time an advertiser created a new goal they had to create a new script. Now, with UET, Bing has made it more compatible and more flexible to track conversions,” explained John Gagnon, Bing Ads Evangelist at Microsoft.

“Bing is likely leveraging UET in order to increase adoption of their tracking tags,” explains former Microsoft employee and current VP of Marketing at Acquisio, Chris Doran.

“UET allows advertisers to better target engaged users and gain more visibility into their cross channel campaigns in order to make better decisions. This change positions Bing as a strong alternative to Google Analytics (with data visible in Bing Ads, of course) because now any click can be attributed as an assist towards completed goals,” continued Doran.

What to Expect

“UET will not only help Bing Ads advertisers gain much clearer insights into campaign performance but it also sets the stage for audience management, essential for display advertising, which will likely become a part of Bing’s arsenal,” commented Acquisio co-founder and EVP, Marc Poirier.

Gagnon, the Bing Ads Evangelist at Microsoft, agreed and said “Universal Event Tracking is going to be key for us as we get into the retargeting aspects of search in 2015.”

“With Incremental bids, if someone abandoned their cart or logged in and left, advertisers are able to bid more for those people. If Bing expands into display this script will be a core component.”

It is unclear when these retargeting additions will be rolled out, but according to Gagnon, “Universal event tracking is like the gift that keeps giving, there is going to be a lot more coming up.”