Bing Ads recently announced the international launch of the Universal Event Tracking for enabling advertisers to define as well as track goals crucial and specific to their area of business operations.
The search engine major also made an official announcement that Universal Event Tracking or UET will now pave way for audience focused remarketing scenarios said to be launching “soon.”
UET will enable the advertisers to understand and comprehend a whole lot more such as:
- The ad campaigns which are efficient as far as conversion goals are concerned
- Keywords that specifically enhance conversions and reduce bounce rates
- ROI or return on investment for the dollars spent on advertising
- Customer segments associated with better conversion and therefore more value
- Nature of engagement keywords have on the site such as duration per visit, bounce rate, pages per visit and so on.
UET has come in the place of conversion tracking functionality provided in Campaign Analytics. Tags created prior to July 2013 will cease to be supported by the month of April in 2015. While the more recent tags will still receive support, they will be read only via Campaign Analytics. Creation of any fresh tags will involve the use of UET.
This tracking is in line with last click attribution for assignment of conversions to particular keyword ad clicks. Support for at least 4 different types of goals are provided by Bing Ads Universal Event Tracking.
Goals For Bing Ads UET
The 4 goals are as follows.
The first goal involves destination and it is achieved when a particular page is loaded by the user. An example of this is if the user receives an acknowledgement and thanks for making online transactions at a site.
The second goal is about duration and this goal is achieved when the user session lasts for a particular specified duration of time. For instance, the user may spent a few minutes filling out comments and playing games on a site.
The third goal involves pages viewed per visit. This is achieved when the user sees a specific number of pages per session or visit. For instance, the user flips through all 50 pages of a real estate listings catalog at online real estate agency sites.
Finally, the event related goal is achieved when a certain action is triggered. This goal can be tailor made to suite requirements such as the example that users spend around 70% of the time listening to music or commentary on the site.
Users well versed with goal setting in Google Analytics will be able to easily set up goals in Bing Ads UET.
Universal Event Tracking is based on a single code snippet placed on the site and not individual tracking codes for various goals. Upcoming audience remarketing segments will be then supported via the same code snippet.
UET is also perfect for tracking across devices when Bing Ads “knows that devices belong to the same user.” User ID lets Bing know which multiple devices the same single user has.
A Microsoft spokesperson has issued the statement that:
“Microsoft is able to recognize the same user across devices by using an anonymous identifier (MSID). The MSID is used to describe a persistent unique identifier used by Microsoft Advertising to deliver targeted ads and recognize the same user across devices and Microsoft services. Customers have a choice to opt out of targeted advertisements that use the MSID by visiting http://choice.microsoft.com/en-us/opt-out and turning off the control that says “Personalized Ads Wherever I use my Microsoft Account.”
Microsoft is not the only one employing ID for replacing cookies and tracking users across multiple devices as others such as Google and Facebook have also done so. But before this announcement, Microsoft has never previously acknowledged its use for Bing Ads.
As the code is not placed on conversion pages only, Universal Event Tracking is useful for obtaining data and giving insights on various metrics for engagement such as bounce rare, average of the period for which the visit is made and average pages per visit at keyword level.
Bing Ads Universal Event Tracking works with all the leading tag management systems such as Adobe Tag Manager, Ensighten, Google Tag Manager, Tealium, QuBit and Signal Digital.
Considerably more information can be obtained from the implementation guide.
