Posted by & filed under Microsoft Ads.

Hosted by MJ DePalma (SEM Pro Channel manager, Bing Ads), this workshop has Jamie Chung (Program Manager, Bing Ads) explaining how Upgraded URL’s simplifies ad tracking and improves URL management. Further he explains the features that advertisers must be prepared for when Upgraded URL’s gets rolled out. Learn the details in this workshop and get trained

You can view the video of the workshop here.

 

Here’s the transcript of the video.

 

MJ: Welcome everyone to the Bing Ads Upgraded URLs Workshop Part 2. My name is MJ DePalma and I will be your host today, which means I’ll be monitoring Q & A and helping you get the most out of your webcast experience. Our webcast console that you see is customizable on your site which…, you can click the content widgets that you see on your screen and move them around, or size them for optimal viewing on the screen size that you have. You can expand the slide area by clicking on the ‘Maximize’ icon on the top right of the slide area, or by dragging the bottom right corner of the slide area.

We recommend, if you can, to leave all the widgets as they are, so you have the ability to see all the great resources at the same time. For example, the left rail has the speaker bios, but more importantly to participate in Q & A, which we encourage. Please feel free to input your questions as you have them in the lower left Q & A widget, and we’ll be trying to answer them as we go, but certainly we plan on leaving 10 to 15 minutes today at the end to answer as many questions as possible. If you have a chance, and we run out of time and do not answer all questions, our API team will answer them via our follow-up blog post.

Keep in mind we do capture all questions, and we are definitely listening. Interesting to know, based on the first workshop we did on Upgraded URLs, where we had so many great questions and dialogue, it inspired us to have this Part 2, with customer-inspired content. Also, direct your attention to the ‘Resource’ widget in the upper right corner that houses all the resources, the API team wanted to share with you today, including, for your convenience, the presentation from today that is already available for download. Also, there are links to stay in touch with us at the end of the deck.

Also, it is worth mentioning that since this is Part 2 of a 2-part series on Upgraded URLs, if you would like to refresh your memory after today’s webcast on what we talked about in the first call, you can grab the link to the ‘Replay’ of our first Upgraded URL call and listen later. Also, please feel free to subscribe to our Bing Ads API YouTube channel, so you can be sure to get notified when we post something new. We’d love to keep you in the know as much as possible, and this is a great way to do so.

An ‘On Demand’ version of today’s webcast will be available approximately 24 to 72 hours after the webcast and can be accessed at the same link that you registered with, or at our Bing Ads API You Tube channel. If your colleagues or friends couldn’t make it at this time, please feel free to share the same registration link, and after they’ve registered, they’ll be able to watch the same ‘On Demand’ version.

Last housekeeping item, at the very end, we have a quick one-question poll that we’d love your feedback on. So stick around and share your valuable input. Your voice is very important to us. Without further ado, I would like to introduce our speaker today, Jamie Chung, who has been part of the Bing Ads family for over two years, primarily focusing on Campaign Management experiences for our advertisers. He’s currently focused on improving URL management through ‘Upgraded URLs’, and I’m very excited to hand the mike over to Jamie to take you through all his great content. Jamie, the mike is yours.

Jamie: Awesome. Thank you, MJ. Good morning everyone, how’s everyone doing? I just want to wish everyone a Happy Thursday, and we’ll just go ahead and get started, and dive right into the content today. Before we do get started, there’s a small disclaimer. I’ll just make sure I’ll read that to you, it’s around the same page. So basically, “The documents that we’re talking about today and any content provided is just for informational purposes only. Some of this information relates to pre-released products which may have to be modified before that’s commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here.”

Basically long-term short, we just want to make sure that this content is coming fresh off the press. Yes, we want to be transparent with what we’re doing here, but do understand that this confirmation is not fully locked and we’re still making improvements based on your feedback and keep that feedback coming. Without further ado, kind of dive deep into what we want to talk about today. So some things I want to make sure, everyone who’s attending does have some ‘Learn’ outcomes.

Yes, we want to give some updates on our timelines Upgraded URLs, we want to review some ‘must knows’ about Upgraded URLs, ‘best practices’ that we’ve seen and what Bing would actually like to recommend, and some ‘common gotchas,’ some scenarios which the advertisers will run into some common pitfalls, and we want to make sure you guys are best prepared to address these head-on. Lastly touch on how to prepare your tools and customers so that we can actually have a fairly joint communication with Upgraded URL. So, you’re in the know, we’re in the know, and then our customers are actually off to get the best experience of this transition period.

Next we’ll talk about the updates in timelines. Originally had our forced migration planned for Upgraded URLs targeting on September. We’ve listened to your feedback, with project concerns, especially for customers in their resale vertical; we understand that customers are… in this time of [lean], they want to ramp their traffic, they don’t want to actually worry about managing other URLs and accounts and making all those head changes before the [inaudible 0:05:19], you know, especially in a holiday season. With that we’re pleased to actually let you guys know that we will not be imposing a forced migration in the kind of September timeline.

upgraded urls timeline bingads

For the record, just the remainder of the calendar year 2016, we will not be requiring customers to migrate their URLs to Upgraded URLs. What we want, so atleast apps. or apps. for you guys as partners, and API, like API customers and so forth, is just be V10 and the upgraded URLs ready, the idea is that if customers want to go ahead and enable this feature, there is benefits for those large spending customers; there is benefits for even two providers to Upgraded URLs, people who do migration on behalf of those customers. Be V10 ready, be ready for upgraded URLs; then once your customers are enabled into the ‘Pilot’, that they can be unblocked.

We don’t again want to force customers up to think about this transition period with the upcoming holiday season. And that’s [inaudible 0:06:18] will stand for rest of this year.

And a spirit of transparency…we do want to ensure that if we were to make any timeline changes, we want to give you at least a six months period so you can plan and predict and also understand and ask questions, if we were to enforce a forced migration at a later time, what is relaxed at, for calendar year 2016, there is no requirement for migration.

Looking at the timelines of Upgraded URLs, July 2016 is when we want to be readily available, so what that means is that we’ll have goods ready in production for customers to be enabled and for tool buyers to actually start making that …to start migrating those URLs.

We won’t be rolling this out completely to the customer base; just we don’t want to add complexity, especially with the holiday season approaching. So, think of it as a [CPU] app. you will receive and I’m …work with you and your customers to enable them into ‘Pilot’. And then again, to reiterate, we will not be requiring the migration for this calendar year. We do want to harbour, make sure that your customers and that you would actually get a very good experience with Upgraded URLs. Or actually, in addition, is to go ahead enable your QA account into “‘Pilot’”.

We have a small mental checklist; we want to make sure that you guys are all aware of and we’re in the same page. Have you successfully done your end-to-end testing for your API access? Do you have any questions that you need for us? If so, do let us know. Have your customer list really been submitted for ‘Pilot’ enablement? Once you’re ready to start this migration process, let us know so we can actually work with each one of these customers.

If you’re moving large amounts of URLs over – we’re talking about hundreds of millions, tens of millions, also just be transparent with us so that we can also be prepared. What we don’t want to happen is that you move these URLs over and that we’re not prepared and that your ads can go [dark]. This is not good for either of us and we want to make sure we’re clearly transparent with your intentions and that we can keep that open communication throughout. The email address that you want to reach out to us directly is bingads-pilot@microsoft.com. That will put you in touch with engineering and definitely I would encourage you to utilize that channel.

MJ: That’s kind of like a bat phone, right Jamie?

Jamie: Kind of like a bat phone.

MJ: Yeah, so make sure you use it at the earliest, direct line.

Jamie: But those who do have two, I guess, technical account managers or partner account managers, do leverage them as well; they do have the same access to us. I’m in engineering, but we want to make sure that the phone is open. We are listening and we do want to hear from you. Those segways in ‘must knows’, ‘best practices’, and ‘common gotchas’ for Upgraded URLs, firstly we’re touching the “must knows’. So Upgraded URLs will introduce a few basic validation rules for URLs. First off, final mobile URLs must start with http and https. Fairly simple.

The second is that tracking templates must reference the landing page URL. You can use permutation of the {lpurl} tag, the {unescapedlpurl}, may be a couple of encoding lpurl+2 etc. But those are the very basic URL rules that we want in place from a data scientist perspective. The second is URL domain mismatch. The domain name of the display URL that is actually shown to the advertiser on the Bing surf must also be the domain name that is actually used after the landing page has done a redirection and a tracking number has been applied.

url domain mimatch bingads

We have a link in this deck, that’ll point to our URL landing page policies. Definitely take a look at that and let us know if you have any questions or feedback on that. We want to be fairly transparent with how we do our validations and where these validations and how you actually may encounter any restrictions in validations, so do give that a read. I know that it’s a resource that may have not been fairly broadcast in the past, so we want to make sure you actually have this first-hand information, so review and read and let us know if you have any questions.

MJ: And Jamie, that link is also available to you right now in the upper right hand corner in your “Resources List.”

Jamie: Secondly, I guess more thirdly, with Upgraded URLs, we actually have increased URL character limits. Today, Destination URL has a limit of 1024. We’ve had various discussions. We heard your feedback that this is too little. We’ve actually bumped this up and actually multiplied this by two, so now Final URLs, Mobile URLs and so forth have a character limit of 2048. Tracking templates also seem to like carry that same character limit of 2048, so we consider that you can actually have both the tracking template and the Final URL used in combination, the limit actually is increased to 4096.

url limit bingads

Do take advantage of it, but I know some customers have been blocked in the past by having too long of the URLs based on tracking or redirection, so this should be a fairly good news for most complex advertisers. Next we’ll talk about Upgraded URLs and auto-tagging enabled. We’ve had a few questions around how auto-tagging is actually applied with Upgraded URLs. Consequently for those who may not know auto-tagging is enabled on our advertiser’s account, auto-tagging in Bing Ads really means that we’ll append the 5 UTM tag to the Destination URL after it’s been served, so that’s UTM content, UTM’s campaigns and term, UTM keyword and UTM medium.

The misconception with how auto-tagging is applied is that auto-tagging is actually applied on the effective Serving URL after substitution and tracking templates have been applied. What that means is that auto-tagging actually is appended on to the tracking server, but not on the actual Final URL if both are being used. This common misconception could lead to advertisers asking why auto-tagging isn’t being applied to the URLs. Our best practice and work around for this is actually to append the URL to the end of the tracking template, [ease in] LPURLl tags so that those LPURLs can take up the auto-tagging primers that we append.

If there’s any questions that you have, which you would expect us to change this behaviour, do let us know. We’re open to your feedback in making this change. We just need to understand how everyone’s advertiser needs can be different. So, to recap, so the Combined URL and Effective URL are only used for these illustration purposes. We only apply the auto-tagging after the effective Serving URL has been chosen. So if a customer is using a tracking template, this is actually appended to the tracking template since that’s the last reference of the URL and the customer who is not using the tracking template would then be appended to the Final URL.

We’ll then walk in some ‘best practices’. So these are just recommendations we would like to make to our tool bearers and likewise to our advertisers as well. The first best practice we want to encourage advertisers, and you guys as partners, is to utilise this account-level tracking templates. Account-level tracking templates are awesome because it gives advertisers the power to change all the URLs in their accounts without having their ads go dark.

account level tracking bingads

The few other benefits we want to encourage is, because it simplifies the story for making these bulk changes, instead of making changes across millions of URLs, you can bulk edit or push in all those ads back in the system, you can just go ahead and just update the account object which has the account-level tracking template and all those campaigns, ad groups, ads and so forth get that change for free. If you aren’t taking advantage of that account-level tracking template, we do encourage you to do the campaign on an ad group, just any entity that isn’t URL-based.

So, don’t put it on the keyword unless you really need to, don’t put it on the ad, don’t put it on [sitelink] extension, just so you can avoid that. The second best practice we want to let you guys know about is the usage of {param 1,2,3}. We realize that {param 1,2,3} is a legacy tracking method that we use for QA-level tracking. What we’ve realized is that advertisers are using that {param1} values in their keywords and that’s what user’s, their actual landing page URL. We want to provide recommendation to actually move away from {prime 1, 2 and 3}; I mean, actually utilizing Upgraded URLs or at least utilizing keyword Destination URLs.

So the best practice around this is a two-step process. Firstly is to migrate your {param 1’s} to Final URL. So before, for a keyword ‘Red Flowers’, because you would actually migrate the values from {param 1} into Final URL, and then secondary is actually to set the ad creative URLs to the Display URL. The next best practice is around Mobile URLs and how customers are using this today. Customers are using {IfMobile} to actually change the way their landing page would actually redirect customers to, based on if they’re on a mobile device or not.

With Upgraded URLs, there’s now a new Mobile URL field that’s explicitly used for Mobile URLs. What that means is that if there’s a specific traffic or a different landing page you want customers to end up on, if they’re coming from a mobile device, it’s a little more clean of an experience for customers and definitely more readable for customers, if they want to make those changes on their own behalf. They get…slice of some original stuff. So this is the second part of {param 1,2,3} and how we want to advise you to migrate.

So, essentially, ad creatives today who are using QA-level tracking, their Destination URLs are already using the {param 1} value, which is just a tag {param1}. In order to properly migrate away from {param1}, it’s unrealistic to actually ask an advertiser to actually input a Destination URL for all their existing creatives. The ask is then just to use the domain name of the Display URL in place of the place holder as a Final URL for the ad creative.

This is really a [know-off] on our side because for all those keywords you do have an existing {param1} value or an actual Destination URL, Final URL in place, that will always trump the ad creative in this process, so the ad creative does need a URL in place, so they are using the Display URL of the domain name…the domain name of the Display URL is just a place-holder to bypass our fundamental checks that an ad creative does need a URL in place. Secondary, this is again the UI for what would actually display for Mobile URLs.

The first screen is actually how Destination URLs are shown today. Destination URLs is just one big field and you can actually see the customers input both Mobile URL and the Desktop URL, if you will, in the same text box. It’s not very readable and then we actually see that customers are making mistakes by not properly using the tag. Now with using the upgraded URLs in the second screen shot, the customers have an explicit control to control their desktop Final URL as well their Mobile URL. Again, it’s more readable and the intent is very clear for the customer if they want to make those changes. The last best practice we want to recommend today – just do let us know what you were thinking in terms of your migration plans.

Definitely work with your TAMs, your Technical Account Managers, or your Partner Account Managers or your PAMs, if you do have them, just so that we can also logistically schedule, so make sure you can have the best experience migrating all these large volumes of URLs.
We do want to work [with you] in addition to actually minimize the policy latency you will see for ads and keywords. If you’re moving tens of millions of keywords or tens of millions of ads over, do work with us so that we can also work with our editorial and policy team to minimize the [inaudible 0:18:20] so your ad continues to run while you’re making those changes.

We have a few resources here, and again, also in the “Resource” widget. Do work with your TAMs and PAMs, do ask questions on our MSDN Developer Forums, so that we can actually engage and share that content with everyone else in the community. And lastly, don’t hesitate to e-mail us if you have any worrying questions.

Next we move into some ‘common gotchas’. So these are things that we’ve seen some questions arise from customers. We just want to make sure we’re also very transparent with this. We think some questions are on inheritance and overrides, as in which tracking template gets chosen or which custom parameter gets chosen. The rule of thumb is that the entity at the lowest level chooses precedence. So, for instance, if you look at the Bing Ads customer account structure, the customer, which is, has thousands of accounts and the campaigns, ad groups, so forth, they will probably go into the account hierarchy, that sets the precedence for override.

So tracking templates that are defined at the ad creative level will override ad groups, will override campaigns and so forth. The same logic also applies to customer parameters. The second ‘gotchas’ we’ve seen is that customers or advertisers are defining customer parameters, but they’re not actually being resolved. We have no way to validate if a customer parameter is actually referenced at the time of impression, so we will now be with, substitute that data if it’s not present. Just to be cautious, for instance, if a customer is using a customer parameter coupon, but it’s not actually defined in an ad or campaign or in an ad group or creative, we won’t be able to actually substitute that with any value.

tracking management bingads

What we would do to substitute, we won’t substitute the value at all, it will actually just be served as a little string, so you’ll see the ‘curly bracket underscore coupon’. Just on yours and I guess for advertisers, just to make sure that they are properly defining these customer parameters, so they can reference them later. We’ve seen advertisers also run to using tags that we don’t officially support in Bing Ads. If we don’t support those tags, we won’t be able to actually substitute them, and we don’t want to change customer’s data unless we have full, 100% confidence.

So, last thing we want to touch on today is “How to prepare your tools and your customers.” Again we want this to be a shared effort between those at Bing Ads team as well as your partners and your customers, so we definitely want to be in the same page, moving forward. First, a little recap, and this may be a little bit of a recap of our information for folks in the first call, but we’ll just recap in Upgraded URLs together in what the [‘Mission Value Prop 0:21:07] is.

So currently what we’re seeing with advertisers is that advertisers are placing their landing page URLs as well as their tracking information in the same box. Really what happens when advertisers are changing their URLs, they don’t intend to change landing page; they just want o append tracking information. By extracting this out, customers are able to make changes at the account level or campaign or even ad group level, and then those ads aren’t actually modified. We actually are able to inherit those tracking templates for free and bypass review.

Now with Upgraded URLs, again we can split the landing page and tracking information out, so landing page information stays in the Final URL, so that always directs, that tells Bing what is the actual Final destination for this advertiser after they click the ad on the surf. They will show tracking templates where you want to store those tracking information, so now when the advertiser wants to go ahead and make those changes, those ads aren’t actually affected. Again, to reinforce the shared inheritance of the tracking templates, Accounts are overridden by Campaign-level tracking templates, which are overridden by Ad Group tracking templates. The hierarchy still goes then all the way to the Ad Keyword and Site Link level.

Again with tracking templates, their idea is that the less down time we can achieve with ads being served, the more money people can make, the more conversions, more sales these advertisers can have. Definitely do encourage your customers to onboard to Upgraded URLs, definitely do be Upgraded-URLs-ready and V10-ready, so advertisers are going to actually have more time to spend money essentially as a [inaudible 0:23:01]. We have a few more additional resources we want advertisers to be aware of.

Definitely look at the MSDN V10 documentation for Upgraded URLs. We have the updated guides on how to properly use tracking templates, how to properly use customer parameters, and just an overview of what’s included as well in V10. There is a V9 deprication on the horizon, slated for a little bit later in this half of the year. So be aware that V9 deprication is among us and is coming, so do be ready and V10-ready.

Lastly again is that advertisers have the option to use Google Imports. For those who don’t know, Google Imports is an option that we have in both the web product as well as Bing Ads editor. We are able to actually understand, once the customer is enabled in ‘Pilot’, the Final URLs, customer parameters and tracking templates that they have defined in adwords, and we can easily bring those over into the Bing platform. This can save some advertisers a lot of headache instead of doing this migration again in Bing, so those advertisers are able and willing to use Google Import doing [inaudible 0:24:21] as well.

google import

Lastly is for bulk management. Currently Upgraded URLs does have support in Bing Ads editor 10.9.1, those customers who do want to manage those migrations by themselves. In addition, Bing Ads Editor V11 also should be released about now. That also has support of upgraded URLs, if customers do want to be enabled, empowered and manage it by themselves. Lastly, the ‘Help Documentation’ for the web product.

We’re in the process of actually publishing new ‘Help Documentation’ to assist customers and advertisers and tool bearers alike on how to actually properly make these changes. This would go in tandem with the MSDN documentation we have today, or if…. API customers.
The ‘Help Documentation’ is more advertiser and simplified and not for the technical mindset, but still do references to make sure that you are communicating same information to your advertiser and your customers.

MJ: Jamie, this might be a good time to bring up a question that has come in after that section that you just talked about. This is a question that came in about Bing Shopping Ad, about how Upgraded URLs work with the Bing Shopping Campaign. Can you touch on that?

Jamie: Yes, so Bing Shopping Campaigns will have support for Upgraded URLs. Currently the API’s terms are present MSDN, which is the Ad Group [Variable] Criterion. Once we do enable your customers in ‘Pilot’, we’ll also enable them into the Bing Shopping Campaign’s ‘Pilot’. That allows tracking templates and customers parameters to also be shown on the product, and you can actually override in the inheritance; also applies likewise for text ads and keywords. If you’re unable to find a documentation, I’ll definitely post that in answers that will actually link you to the API’s [inaudible 0:26:13] Bing Shopping Campaigns. If you have any other follow-up questions, we can definitely take that up as well.

MJ: That might be a good thing to also post in the blog post, just to call it out, so let’s look for it in there as well.

Jamie: Sure, thanks for asking. For in-season advertisers who are using the API, so maybe you are not [inaudible 0:26:37] URLs provider, but you still do use the API to interact with Bing Ads. Just again to reinforce, do you talk with your agencies, do you talk with your customers so that they are aware that this change is coming? We don’t want to be in a situation where customers are unaware that this change is happening and then all of a sudden, they’re like, “Wait, what’s going on with my ads?” So just be transparent and communicate that with your customers and with your agencies.

Tools providers, we have a couple of API forms we have and [spin it up] such as the Quarterly Call for the Bing Ads API as well these Upgraded URLs workshops. We do want to ensure that you guys are properly prepped and equipped, and you do have the full confidence to go ahead and migrate. Do keep this dialogue going. We do appreciate the feedback that we are getting, we do appreciate the questions, and we just want to make sure we have that transparency going forward.

Again, if you have any feedback on Upgraded URLs, fell free to e-mail us: bingads-’pilot’@microsoft.com. I’ll be more than happy to talk and fill up some time to go through your migration strategies, answer your open questions and work with you in case you have any aberrant issues.

MJ: Now we’re going to go to the Q & A portion of this webcast. But before we get into all the questions that have come over, we would love one question, a poll, if you could just take a moment to answer, and that question is: What do you think about the Updated URLs migration plan in timelines? Is it, “Great, I’m happy there is no required migration?” Or, “I would have preferred a forced migration?” If you could take a moment, and answer that one poll question, folks, that will be great. In the meantime, Jamie, while they’re answering that question, do you want to answer a question that came in about {param1}, is no longer supported with final URL?’

Jamie: Yes. So Priya, thank you for that question. So the question is, “Is {param1} supported Final URLs?” The answer is ‘Yes’ and ‘No’. If you look at the basic URL validations, Final URLs do have to start with http and https, so you cannot just set an ad creative to just use {param1} since it doesn’t actually start with http or https. That doesn’t mean that you cannot reference {param1} in a tracking template, for, in a Final URL; it just cannot start with {param1} and only be that value.

MJ: And then we also have a question, “Can a tool provider safely communicate to customers that there will be no forced migration in 2016?”

Jamie: Yes, tool providers, definitely do let your customers know there is no forced migration by 2016. With V10 ramping up, and with V9 being sunset, tools will be expected to already be V10-ready. At the customer’s discretion, they do want to use Upgraded URLs before the holiday season, it’s at their discretion. We just want to make sure that those customers aren’t blocked and they have the tools ready, so they can complete the migration if they do want the additional reporting enhancements. We will not be requiring in this current year.

MJ: Thanks Jamie. Another question came in, “When will the Bing Web Console have Upgradede URL?”

Jamie: The Bing Web Console…that we will have to take up line; I’m not exactly sure on that.

MJ: You need clarity on the question?

Jamie: Yes, we can definitely take more clarity on that question. I will look to follow up with Priya offline.

MJ: And Priya, if you want to take us again, and re-format that question and shoot it back over to us, you’re more than welcome to do so. And also, could you please elaborate, Jamie, more on what happens in a ‘Pilot’ phase? What is expected from API developers in the ‘Pilot’?

Jamie: From our perspective, in the ‘Pilot’ phase, we’re not enabling customers in the ‘Pilot’ until tools are ready. So, you do have that full confidence that we will not enable those customers until you have completed your end-to-end testing where you’re confident, and then, with that partnership, we will then enable customers in the ‘Pilot’ together. On the flip side, if customers and API developers want to be enabled on their own test accounts ahead of time, to complete the end-to-end testing, that’s something we’re wholeheartedly encouraging and we do want to work with you to get enabled.

MJ: And then let me quote a question to you. I think what was meant in that question earlier was, when Bing Ads UI will….Upgraded URLs be enabled? When is that going to happen?

Jamie: Bing Ads web UI is the available at the same time that customer is enabling the ‘Pilot’. Again, we’re looking to be readily available in July of 2016, at customer’s request and with partnerships with two providers and direct advertisers. We will enable those customers together. So, if it’s in the web UI, July the 16th at the same time with web, desktop and the API.

MJ: Alright.

Jamie: Priya, if you were referring to something else as the Bing Web Console, do let me know so we can make sure we get that question answered.

MJ: And this is your time, you guys, to ask any other questions. We’ve been diligently answering the questions as they came in during the webcast. So we have some awesome subject matter experts in the room helping to answer all your questions. But if you have any other questions, please send them over. I’ll see if we’ve got a couple more in. “How can developers test Upgraded URLs without enabling accounts in ‘Pilot’?”

Jamie: If you guys do not have a test account ready, I do encourage you to create new account you just want to use for a API test access, and then we can just simply enable that account only to ‘Pilot’. Again, for a misconception, ‘Pilot’s’ are controlled in a customer level, so a customer can have multiple accounts. If you are enabling the customer into the ‘Pilot’, make sure that it’s not an active-spend customer. There may be accounts that your advertisers are actually using on that customer. So do create a separate customer shell so that you can actually isolate that testing.

MJ: Any other questions? We’ll take some more… Is there anything else, Jamie, that you wanted to touch on before we actually wrap up? Because we actually did a lot of ground-covering in 35 minutes, so you’ve any other questions, please ask them. Jamie, do you have any other final thoughts? No?

Jamie: Keep your feedback coming, guys. We really do make decisions based on what customers are saying, so do be transparent and do speak up if needed.

MJ: Thank you everyone who joined us today. Please feel free to keep in touch through Twitter. Jamie’s Twitter handle is @jamiechung, and of course there’s the e-mail. Please e-mail directly your questions bingads-’pilot’@microsoft.com. Of course, we always are watching the Twitter feed #AskBingAds, we’re already watching that, so if you wanted to tweet your questions, you’re more than welcome to do that. And one more question before we go: What about the Web UI forced use of Upgraded URL? What will the Web UI force in the use of Upgraded URLs?

Jamie: I see. Thanks for asking that question. The Web UI experience will not force customers to use Upgraded URLs. We will have an option available for them to choose between a Destination URL and the Final URL. That option is only visible once the customer is enabled in ‘Pilot’ and at this time, since we’re not requiring customers to have their URLs migrated in this calendar year, there will be no “Read Only” date for destination URLs in this calendar year. As you make progress Upgraded URLs and we do start enabling more majority of advertisers into this feature, we will share more “Read Only” dates which is [inaudible 0:34:54] only for 2017. Again before we do any “Read Only” dates, we do want to have at least a six months’ heads-up with you guys and tool providers , so you guys can also plan and prioritize accordingly.

MJ: They have actually meant when?

Jamie: When? So currently there’s no forced migration for calendar year 2016.

MJ: Alright. Well, fantastic everyone. Again, we’re here listening, so if you have any follow-up questions that you want answered, please use that e-mail address, and we’re definitely watching for your questions. We’re really happy to keep the lines of communication open because we really care about what our customers have to say, and it’s a partnership, so happy to listen and get back to you on any further questions. You’ll see a blog post come out soon.

The next API call will be on June 08th, to be exact, time is to be determined, but keep a look out on our API blog and we will post the registration link and make sure that everyone has ample time to register for that. So we really look forward to the next call. You’ll hear from Tiffany Sanders who will be taking over from me, but you will also have Jamie Chung on that call to review the API Roadmap.

So again, keep an eye out for the blog post on our data centre and you’ll find the link also on the data centre, for the data centre in the ‘Resource List’ in the upper right hand corner. So, thank you very much everyone and we’ll look forward to hearing from you guys next time.

 

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