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Make better business decisions based on time of ad clicks

Conversion tracking enables you to match each advertising dollar to its business impact and answer important questions like “How successful is my ad campaign?” “Which audiences are converting higher?” or “Which keywords lead to more sales?” The answers and related conversion insights will help you make better decisions for your campaigns. Based on your feedback, we’re making a useful change to our conversion reporting that will help you focus your business decisions and actions across our platform.

What’s changing?

  1. Conversions will now be reported based on the time of the ad click that led to the conversion.
  2. Assists will now be reported based on the time of the ad click that contributed to a conversion.
This will improve the performance of ad schedule bid modifiers, as they align better to the time of the click, instead of the conversion.

Let’s walk through an example to illustrate how this change will show up across our reporting.
  • Day 1: A user clicks on your ad (keyword 1) and browses through your website to see if you have a product they want.
  • Day 2: The same user clicks on another one of your ads (keyword 2) and, while on your website, adds a product to their cart.
  • Day 3: The user goes to your website and completes the purchase of the product in their shopping cart.
Both the conversion event and assist event will be reported to you as the time of the related ad click, making it easier for you to understand the customer journey and related conversion metrics.

Note that our platform will continue to use a last-click attribution model for conversion tracking. That remains unchanged with this update.

If you’re using auto-bidding, no actions are required because the algorithm optimizes using the historical data.
 
Before this change Click Conversion Assist
Day 1 1 0 0
Day 2 1 0 0
Day 3 0 1 1
After this change Click Conversion Assist
Day 1 1 0 1
Day 2 1 1 0
Day 3 0 0 0

What should I expect?

Websites where conversions typically happen close to the click event may not see much change in their reporting. Websites with longer conversion windows from the click event may see some fluctuations in their reporting for a short time as the new reporting data stabilizes. This will not affect any conversion activity on your website, just the reporting data to Bing Ads.

You can review this help article if you see discrepancies between Bing Ads conversion counts and third-party analytics systems.

Questions or comments?

Feel free to visit the Help section of Bing Ads for additional resources on conversion tracking. Let us know if you have any feedback or comments on the conversion tracking experience via our Feature Suggestion Forum or on Twitter.