Bing Ads API Quarterly Call – Feb 2016

Bing Ads recently shared the new and upcoming features in their API product roadmap, that will help advertisers effectively manage campaigns programmatically. Here’s the transcript of their Quarterly Call held in February 2016. Moderated by Tiffany Sanders, the brief was demonstrated by Bing’s program managers Kalyan Nanduru, Jamie Chung and Neha Mohan.

Hear them talk about the features such as Upgraded URLs, App Install Ads, Ad Extensions, Bing Shopping Campaigns and how you can benefit from it. You can view the presentation of BingAds API Quarterly Call here and the video of the transcript here.

The following is the transcript:

Eric: Welcome to today’s BingAds API Quarterly Call, BingAds API Product Roadmap and now without any further delay, like to hand it over to Tiffany Sanders. And Tiffany, you now have the floor.

Tiffany: Thank you Eric. Hello everyone. Thank you all for joining the BingAds API Quarterly Call. In today’s call, we are super-excited to share with you what’s new and upcoming in the BingAds API Product Roadmap. Our goal is to make sure that you walk away with a clear understanding of all the benefits our BingAds features have to offer as well as the resources to support you with the adoption of these features. Before we begin, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to our presenters. My name is Tiffany Sanders and I’ll be your host. I have been with Microsoft for 5 years and am in Operations-Project Manager working on the API partner business team.

One of my areas of focus is to built out a broad-reach communication plan for API partners such as yourself. Kalyan Nanduru is the principal Program Manager and has been with Microsoft for the past 7 years, working on various aspects of advertizing across our Display and Paid Search offerings. He is currently the PM owner for UET, Remarketing as well as the BingAds APIs and SDKs.

Jamie Chung has been part of the BingAds family for over 2 years, primarily focusing on campaign management experiences for end advertisers. He is currently focusing on improving URL management through Upgraded URLs and introducing new and updated ad products for advertisers, including App. Install Ads, Sitelinks, Image and App. Extensions. Joseph Damiani with focus on ad extension such as the Callout and Review Extension.

Neha Mohan is the Senior Program Manager currently working on product ads and Bing shopping campaigns and [Martina 0:01:53] who has been at camp for the past 3 years, supporting both third-party tool providers and direct to advertisers. Eric will be answering your questions at the Chat window today throughout the call. So without further adieu, I will now turn it over to Kalyan who will walk you through a brief introduction to the BingAds API and review the agenda for today.

Kalyan: Hi everyone. My name is Kalyan Nanduru. On behalf of Engineering PM team, I would like to thank you all for making your time today to attend this Quarterly API Call. We have quite a few topics that we are all excited to be talking about today. Of course, most of you are already familiar with the APIs, BingAds APIs, yet another entry point into BingAds, besides the UI, besides the BingAds Editor and the Mobile app. BingAds APIs allows you to programmatically manage your campaigns, download reports and optimize your campaigns and so on. For today’s call, we will start with Upgraded URLs, which is a faster, more efficient way to manage your URLs and tracking templates. Jamie will explain more about how they will work and how you can benefit from some of it’s features.

Then we will move on to App. Install Ads, which will let you show ads for users to install apps. You can also track number of app. installs as conversions. Jamie Chang again will talk about those things. Moving on from then, we will talk about a few ad extensions. As you know, ad extensions can be very effective in improving the CTRs and increasing the Quality Score of your campaigns. We have a whole bunch of ad extensions that are coming out. Jamie and Joseph will partner to talk about some of these ad extensions.

We will then move on to talk about upgrading product ad campaigns to Bing Shopping Campaigns. As most of you know, Bing Shopping Campaigns have been around for a while now. They have the latest and greatest way of managing the products that you have in your Bing merchant centers. They offer a ton of benefits and this API call will talk about our plans to migrate the [Legafee inaudible 0:04:22] product badge to Bing Shopping Campaigns. Last but not the least, there have been some questions and confusion around what exactly we are deprecating with V9 and what our future plans are with the various services we have under the API umbrella, so I would like to bring more clarity to that area, explaining what exactly we are depricating and so on.

And then we want to give a few minutes for Q & A and then Tiffany will take over and walk through some of the resources, explain to you how you may join us for these upcoming features. And then the close of the call. Throughout the call, as Tiffany said, please feel free to ask questions and Tarik will help answer those questions. So without further delay, I will hand it over to my peer, Jamie Chung, who will start with upgraded URL.

Jamie: Thanks Kalyan. Good morning everyone. Welcome. So just to get some context of Upgraded URLs is that currently we use Destination URLs today to track any information you want to use for your ads, such as keywords or may be the [inaudible 0:05:31] of conversion. The problem with this today is that all this information is stored in one single field, so today we have the landing page which may be like your Microsoft.com and you may have tracking informations such as UTM tags or Click IDs or AdGroup Names and so forth that you want to append to these Destination URLs. Any time you do update these tracking information, most likely advertisers are changing and adding tracking information, not necessarily changing their landing page. These Destination URLs need to go back and be re-reviewed and reapproved. In this process, ads can be pulled out of rotation from delivery and that downtime catches, equates to lots of business and lots of conversions.

With Upgraded URLs, the plan is to actually split these into two different concepts. We will maintain the landing page and that will be called the ‘Final URL’. In addition, we will either share tracking template to store any tracking information for URLs. So the [inaudible 0:06:27] report, we have the Destination… In the Destination URLs field, we have both the tracking and the landing page stuffed into one; with Upgraded URLs we will split those out into two so that you can actually maintain in trying the information at very centralized locations. So any time you do make changes to a track information, that can be rippled out while you are in count, campaign, adgroup and so forth.

Again, so with the share-track information, now you’re able to hierarchially manage to track information, so we have, you know, diagrams on right. You can have a share-track information at the account level, and if you were to make changes with account level tracking template, that can ripple down to your campaigns and ad groups, so forth. We can actually overwrite these share-tracking templates at a more granular level. If you have a account level tracking template, you can actually overwrite tracking at the campaign level and then you can also overwrite your ad group or even doing the visual analysis of the keywords, [inaudible 0:07:23] Sitelink level tracking conversions.

Previously we talked about where Destination URLs helped both the landing page information as well as the track information, when you do update these informations in both ‘Edit’ or ‘Final’ place, anything at …the API or web, your ads will get pulled off rotation and get re-reviewed. Now when you have Upgraded URL, when you do make these updates to track information, since it’s not a part of your landing page, not your previous Destination URL, there is no need for us to recall that information, moving to simply append, and meeting URLs and apply, would actually [inaudible 0:08:03] your ads are rotationed. More information Upgrade URLs to be in the appendages at the end, but we’ll move forward with App. Install Ads, and talk about our first ad product.

So with App. Install Ads, the idea behind this is to drive engagement to your app. installs. Imagine if you were to [inaudible 0:08:26], you don’t necessarily want to direct customers to your landing page [inaudible 0:08:31].com. You want customers to actually go and install [inaudible 0:08:34] on their app. store, whether it’s on iTune, App. Store or on the GooglePlay store, the Windows Store. The primary motive behind this is to just drive app. installations. We’ve partnered with a couple of third-party app. conversions, partners for us to probably attribute when a customer does actually install your app. from the App. Store.

What this means is that when a customer clicks the ‘Uber’ app. on the Bing store, you can actually get redirected to the App. Store. The App. Store would actually prompt them to install the app. and once you have got the ‘Open the App.’, you need a way to properly track that attribution because we did successfully complete that [workflow 0:09:22]. With these certified partners, they are probably on board with our mechanisms so that once you are on-board to the SDKs, once a user does actually open the app., after installation, we can actually re-attribute that installation back through BingAds, so that information will go through reporting and we have other important integrations coming in through in the future.

Moving next, we’ll talk about Image Extensions. Image Extensions is a way to make your ads kind of more as a, with using image decorator. Previously we used to have several annotation, may be ‘Call out’, ‘Review’ or ‘Sitelink’ or ‘Enhance Sitelinks’ with different description tags, but with Image Extensions, we actually allow the ability to service an image, based on different ratios on the BingAds group. You are able to decorate this image with a description or may be as a plain text. It can help several image within rotations with a campaign or the adgroup level and then the BingAds algorithm will actually take one to serve the time of delivery. This is probably generally available on all devices and also for all customers worldwide. Next, we’ll go ahead and transition to Call Extensions and we’ll have Joseph talk more about that.

Joseph: Thank you very much, Jamie. In addition to Image Extensions, two new ad extensions we have on the radar here for BingAds, which you may be familiar with from Adwords today, our Callout Extensions and Review Extensions. I’ll be covering Call-Out first. So Callout Extensions allow you to showcase what makes your business unique. On the right hand side, we have the image of highlighting four Callout Extensions. Each ad can serve with upto four Callouts.

For example, we see that this customer is highlighting operating downtown location package deals for Seattle hotels. The Callout Extensions appear below in ads text and alongside other ad extensions that may already be serving with your ads. We recently opened up a pilot for Callout Extensions in the BingAds Web DUI, you know, a little note there on the side being, “We’re serving Callout Extensions in all of our single wide markets or all of our markets except HongKong and Taiwan. For mainline insight for ads, PC and tablet devices on the Bing owned and operated network only.”

One little caveat on the bottom is that the caller text is inclickable and we don’t want it to duplicate anything that’s already in the ad. We wanted to….again, as extensions are intended to enrich the ad, booster Quality Score, engage to reach out more customers with a higher click-through rate. We opened up just this morning Sandbox access to test Callout Extensions in our APIs in both the Campaign Management and Bulk APIs and we are looking to GA or making it to [inaudible 0:12:27] generally available for the end of the first quarter or very early second quarter and we’ll have an accompanying API blogpost out with that, and the necessary MSN documentation to interject. So alongside Callouts, as I mentioned, we also have Review Extensions basically on the exact same timeline as Callouts. We opened up a pilot recently in the BingAds Web UI. And Review Extension, what we are allowing customers to do with these, tell the world what people are saying about your business.

So with Review Extensions, you can highlight trusted third-party reviews in your search ads. On the right hand side here, we have a review from ZDNet saying that dynamics, the Microsoft dynamics breaks down silos between sales and marketing. So searchers on Bing will be able to see that review, know your reputation on the review source, and possibly attribute that positive review to your business. We serve one review per ad and just like Callout Extensions, all other Extensions today, Reviews serve alongside other ad extensions.

Similar to Callout Extensions, our Review Extensions will be serving, you know, single wide markets for mainline and sidebar ads, PC and tablet devices on Bing ONO only and one great news is that ‘Quick Summary Reviewing’ got free. By clicking on the ‘Review’ links, customers are redirected to third-party review source to check out review and see it on it’s original source page, but that click in itself is free. Only clicks on the ads will be charged as normal. Alongside Callout, this was also opened in our Sandbox for your testing this morning and we’ll be following the same timeline of GA [inaudible 0:14:30], end of the first quarter or early second quarter with accompanying blogpost and MSN documentation. Up next, Neha will tell you a little bit about the upgrading your product ads to Bing Shopping Campaigns.

Neha: Hi. Thank you Joseph. Hi everyone, good morning. I will be talking about transitioning your product ad campaigns to Bing Shopping Campaigns today. For all the folks who are not really familiar with what Bing Shopping Campaigns is, it’s nothing but a new campaign type which we launched, I think, around a year back, for managing your product ads campaign. The biggest plus side of Bing Shopping Campaigns is it provides you more granularity and it provides you more control on how you manage your product ads, which was not available in the traditional way of managing the product ad campaign. As far as the ad format goes, it’s still going to be the same. You’re not really changing the actual ad product; that is still the product ads which you see on Bing, with the image, with the text, the price. What we’re changing is how you manage those ad campaigns. With Bing Shopping Campaigns, we also provide you very detailed reporting. We’ve added ‘Share-A-Voice’ supporting to the mix as well, to provide you more control over how you bid, how you target and ultimately how the ads deliver.

And there is a last type of this churning, you’re going to now automatically transition your products ads campaigns to Bing Shopping Campaigns. For folks who have not had the chance to migrate on their own, this would be a good opportunity to leverage the new campaign type. We have already started on this journey, the first phase which started in February has already happened, so for anybody now who is trying to create the new product ad campaign, they wouldn’t have been able to do so. What is stopping the system currently is the ability to create new product ad campaigns, but if you have existing product ad campaigns, you could still manage them.

You could have gone in and changed your bids, moved around your targets, backfoot how it worked, but if anybody was coming into the system for the first time and trying to create a product ad campaign, that would have failed. The second phase where we will start the post-transition is going to happen, starting March 1st. It’s going to happen in waves and that transition will continue for the whole of March. Basically what this means is once your campaign has been transitioned over to Bing Shopping Campaigns, you can no longer go and make edits to your bids or targets on the product ad campaign site. You cannot change or add any product ad extension either.

We will not be pausing your product ad campaigns after the migration or after the transition. They would still be in active state and the newly created BSC campaigns will also be in active state. So we urge folks at this time to take a look at their structure and make sure that you pause your PA campaigns or make changes to the migrated or upgraded BSC campaigns, if the upgrade is not upto what you want. And finally, in April, what we are planning to do is we’re going to stop delivery of all traditional product ad campaigns. Again, the ad campaign itself will not be deleted. We will be deleting the product ad extension which is associated with the campaign, so in a sense, your product ads will no longer be able to deliver. And in meantime, if you now, if you try to update things or you try to access controls which are not provided, you will see an ‘error’ which I have already mentioned here. You will just receive a ‘Campaign Service Product Listing Error’.

The few key points to note around the transition are, we currently have an option in the UI as well which provides advertisers an option to transition on their own. That’s the ‘At’ option of manually transitioning. The mechanics of that and the mechanics of automatically upgrade people are going to be the same. The same mapping rules will apply. On the table you see like, in traditional product ad campaigns types, we have BingAds labels, we have BingAds groupings, SKU and Seller ID. These four entities are no longer supported on the shopping campaigns. So for an order for us for the migration of the upgrade to happen smoothly, we will be mapping these to custom labels.

The BingAds label will get mapped to custom labeled 4, grouping will get to mapped custom level 3 and SKU to 2 and Seller ID to 1. A key point to note here is that these mappings will only happen on the campaign site. So basically your campaign fortress and your product target attributes will get mapped accordingly, but we will not be mapping your feed attributes. So in case you’ve been using these columns and you opt into either use the tool or you opt in for the automatic upgrade, the mapping on the feed side needs to be taken, kept prior to that.

So you would have to ensure that you are kind of mapping the BingAds labels to custom labels for column on your feed and forth. If that aspect is not taken care of, even after the upgrade, you will see the campaigns could potentially go dark because they will not map the correct products. And obviously we recommend that, you know, you transition to Bing Shopping Campaigns manually on your own, prior to the automatic transition because obviously when you transition manually, you have more control as to how many campaigns you are moving over and if things are not looking good, you can actually pause them, make changes and then move ahead versus with the automatic one, although we’ll try our best to make sure the integrity of the campaign is not damaged, but you know, with these things, we cannot guarantee a 100% lossless upgrade, so we definitely recommend that you manually transition.

And then the second point to note is, if you have already moved over to Bing Shopping Campaigns and you have product ad campaigns lingering in the system, please take some time and either pause or delete those campaigns because when we run the system through the automatic upgrade, we’re going to take all active or paused PA campaigns and we’re going to create corresponding Bing Shopping Campaigns for you. It will just add more noise to your account. If the PA campaigns is paused, the newly created Bing shopping Campaigns will also be paused, so there won’t be any impact to your delivery, but it will just, you just have more duplicate campaigns in your systems.

And again, either if you even manually transition or you use the tool or you depend on us to upgrade you, once the upgrade is done, please ensure that your newly created campaigns actually match some offers and products. If you log in via UI, this exercise is pretty easy to do. You can go into the products tab and look at the offers present there or you could actually go in the product group tab as well and see how many offers match each and every note. Currently we don’t have that functionality available in the API, but just for a one time quick check, this is a good thing to do.

And I have already mentioned about the mapping. I think that’s the key to the automatic upgrade, is to ensure your feed as well as your campaigns, both are in sync. And you know, after that in April we hope that everybody will be on Bing Shopping Campaigns to be able to leverage the new and awesome functionality that provides. So that’s all that I have in terms of the transition plan. If there are any questions or any concerns, feel free to work with your AMs, feel free to post those questions at ‘Chat’. We will do all our best to, you know, provide you with the guidance and support needed for the next, upcoming months. With that, I will like to now hand over to Kalyan.

Kalyan: Thank you Neha for that overview on the product ads to BAC migration. This is Kalyan again. I would like to talk a little bit about different services behind the APIs and what our plans are with respect to V9 and V10 and so on. Before I talk about the versions, we’ll just quickly do a recap of what all services constitute the BingAds API. When we say BingAds API, we mean lot of services that are behind that, that make up the APIs. If you look at the table on the right, we have the Campaign Management API, which is a SOAP API. All of these are SOAP APIs, Campaign Management, you make a bunch of API calls to set up your campaigns, to manage them, to set ad extensions and so on. Bulk is, it provides the equivalent of that wherein you can do all these operations in a batch. You can download an Excel file, make changes, upload them back and so on. Recently, in October last year, we shipped the V10 versions of Campaign and Bulk.

Moving on, we also merged that part of the release last year. We merged the Ad Intelligence and Optimizer Service into one service called the ‘Ad Insights’ and we shipped that as THE version V10. So last October, we shipped Campaign Management Bulk and Ad Insight APIs as V10. We still support the V9 versions of Campaign Management, Bulk and Ad Intelligence and Optimizer Service APIs and we intend to continue to support the V9 versions of those APIs until end of Q2, which is when we will depricate the V9 versions of those APIs and then after that time, the V10 versions will, what needs to be used, to be able to access our services. However, that is not everything with the APIs. There is more services, like the Reporting API will let you download all the reports, performance reports, conversion reports and so on. We also have the Customer Management API and the Billing APIs – all of these three APIs are on V9. We have not yet shifted V10 and we do not plan in the short term to shift to a newer version of those APIs.

So we will continue to support the V9 version of these APIs – the Reporting, the Customer Management and the Billing APIs until the point where we can merge. So let me step back just a moment and say that, in general, we have had, big plans for ourselves of these multiple versions of different services, a mismatch, if I may say, of these service versions that we have. Long term goal is to get all of the services into one version and when we ship a new version, we’ll push all of these versions to that higher version. Unfortunately that’s not where we are right now and we are actively working towards it. So in an effort to do that, our plan is that for all the APIs that are still in V9 and we don’t have a V10 version, we chart the Reporting API, the Customer Management API, and the Billing API.

We simply plan to skip the V10 and then shift V11 along with the V11 of all the Campaign Management, Bulk and Ad Insight APIs. So once we do that, all of the services, again, Ad Intelligence and Optimizer are depricated, so you will not see them; all of the services, by that I mean Campaign Management, Bulk, Ad Insight, Reporting, Customer Management, Customer Billing, when we shift to V11 versions of those, all of them will be V11 and after that we intend to, whenever we make significant changes, we’ll release the next annual version of all of them together.

Until that point, as I was saying before, we will continue to support the V9 version of Reporting, Customer Management and Billing. However, the V9 version of Campaign Management, Bulk and Ad Intelligence and Optimizer Service, they will be depricated by end of Q2, CY 16. Any enhancements we have in the interim, we talked about a bunch of ad extensions; we talked about the migration and some other minor enhancements coming. They will happen on the existing versions and the latest versions of the API. For example, when we ship Callout Review Extensions or App.

Install Ads, they will all be under V10 version of the Campaign Management and Bulk API, because that’s the latest version. If you were to make any minor enhancements to Reporting, that will be on V9, whichever is the latest version and then eventually long term, we will upgrade all of this to V11 and we will start shipping all of them together. So that’s our plan. Hopefully this brought more clarity to what our plans are with respect to API versions and so on. Again, we apologize for the mismatch of versions. We are aware of the confusion and frustration that it may cause, but hopefully this brought more clarity and we’re actively working towards making sure that we don’t end up in this stage in the long term.

With that, I would like to start opening up this whole meeting to Q & A’s. We do see that there are a bunch of questions that are come, that you guys have posted. I will try to, and Tarik has been responding to them on the IM, so we will probably, are able to read those responses. In addition to that, we can also have the PMs, say more, answer more, provide more detail to those questions. So I will start taking some of the questions that you are typing and ask the relevant PM to start answering. So we will start with Upgraded URLs and I’m looking over the question. The question we have is: When Adwords made it’s shift to Upgraded URLs, it enabled the advertisers to use it’s automated upgrades process and the URLs were upgraded without Adword intervention. Is Bing planning on offering an automated upgrade process before depricating the classic URL format? So I will have Jamie chime into that and answer that question. Jamie, if you can?

Jamie: Thanks Kalyan. So yes, we’ll be offering an automated upgrade process in the long term. Google’s automated process only apply for customers who are qualified and those who are pretty basic URL scenarios. For URLs that are more complex, using redirects and multiple [inaudible 0:30:39]for different redirection service, so those customers would not be eligible for the upgrade process. With that being said, we would have proper guides in place to help guide those customers to greater count new URLs and to Final URL and also shared-tracking component, but the URL automated [inaudible 0:30:57] process would be also opt-in, so once the tool is available, more likely we’ll build in the Web UIs and customers can go ahead and do like a bulk upgrade, prop into it manually or opt in ahead of time. They can upgrade the URLs to Destination URL, upgraded URLs, if they do need the basic URL and all these…

Kalyan: Thank you Jamie. There is another question related to App. Install Ads and Upgraded URLs. The question is: Do you have to have the Upgraded URLs in place in order to use the App. Install Ads? Can you respond to that please?

Jamie: Yes. So URLs, Upgraded URLs is a part of App. Install Ads. What that means is that the App. Install Ads entity uses the Upgrade URLs properties. It does not use a traditional Destination URL that is being depricated. With that being said, you do not have to migrate entire accounts to use Upgraded URLs in order to onboard on App. Install Ads. You can use the same in parallel, so you can actually have your Legacy, Text Ads, Keywords, Sitelink Extensions using the traditional Destination URL and then create a new ad type to use in the Upgraded URLs. You can actually have mix-mode in that process. Eventually, with …like in V11, we’ll have all our entities using the Upgraded URLs, on contract that the Final URLs, the Mobile URLs, the App. URLs, tracking templates, an addition to customer parameters. For the pilot, for App. Install ads, you do have to be enabled in the Upgraded URL pilot as well in order to have access to those fields. So those two pilots are in tandem. We can still have your account in mix-mode.

Kalyan: Thanks Jamie. That’s very helpful. And we do have more time for Q & A’s, so please feel free to ask us more questions and we’ll do our round, in-between the PMs to try to answer your question, in addition to responding in written form, as Tarik is…. So we have a few questions around Review Extension that I would like Joseph to help with. The question we have is: Where are reviews sourced from, for the Review Extension? Is it possible to select different sources, wherein advertizer wants to source the reviews?

Joseph: Yeah. Thanks, Kalyan. I will be happy to answer that. So instead of choosing from a pre-compiled list of sources, when creating Review Extension, advertisers are able to specify the review source themselves, that they would like to submit, so they would submit the review source, source URL on the review text, when creating that extension, and it will be submitted for editorial review, based on our posted review policies that will be available at GA. We have some baseline policies in place where what review source constitute a valid source.

Kalyan: That makes sense. Thank you, Joseph. There is another question that says: Regarding Review Extensions, can an advertizer filter out unwanted reviews to show up next to their ads? Based on what you said, it looks like the advertizer actually submits the review himself, so I guess the advertizer is in full control of….

Joseph: Yeah, exactly. Because the reviews are created by the advertisers themselves and they will be in full control in determining how they want them to display on Bing, there should be no issues or no filtering works needed for unwanted reviews, on the reviews which you yourself submit, had any potential to show with your ad.

Kalyan: Okay, thank you Joseph. There is a question about the product ads to BSC migration. Neha, if you can answer? The question is: Will clients be warned before their PLAs are…to Bing Shopping Campaigns after 3/1? So it’s basically about what sort of notifications we are offering either in UI or in email or blog? If you can touch upon that, that will be great.

Neha: So we’ve had a round of communications already sent to people who are using product ads. That happened in January. We are following that up with another round of communication in the next couple of days. So folks who are still using the old way of managing the product ads should have an email in their in-boxes by the first week of March. What we will not have is point-to-point emails, like once had migrated a particular account, we will not be sending email to that particular account, but we have broader email communications going out and in the UI though, we’ll have notification once the customer’s account has been migrated.

They will see notification in the UI. They can also use the UI tool which we have, to just convert product ads to Bing Shopping Campaigns, to even monitor progress of the automatic upgrade as well. So in case they have a pretty large account with more than a few thousand campaigns, it will take some time to auto-migrate them or to auto-upgrade them, so the tool will also provide the status of where we are in the process of transitioning them. So that’s how they can keep a tab on what’s happening. And we’ll follow up that with, you know, another email once migrations are done, in probably late March or early April, to all the customers who actually went through that forced migration or forced upgrade. Yes.

Kalyan: Excellent. Thank you Neha for that answer. We have a few more questions that come in about Upgraded URLs. Jamie, again, putting you on the spot: Will Upgraded URLs match validation in Adwords? I give them more than one instant of the same question. Can you take that?

Jamie: Yeah. So for traditional, for Destination URLs in BingAds, we allow using any inputs, just a pre-response text and control keys Prime 1, 2, 3 as well to do, [inaudible 0:37:07] the tracking. With Upgraded URLs, we’re going to expand that validation, be a little more strict. We will require all URLs using Upgraded App. Install with ‘http’ or ‘https’. We are valuing the use of, using backward compatibility from 1, 2 & 3. We don’t like, we will not do this in the long run. At first we may allow demands, using those [primes 0:37:27] in the place of Final URLs, but the base requirements are URLs must match….URLs must start with ‘http’ and ‘https’ and the Display URL of the ad must match the Final…that the domain name of the Display URL must match the domain name of the Final URL.

You cannot have a Display URL that says, ‘Bing.com’ and your landing page actually go to, you know, ‘Microsoftstore.com’. Those two must be the same and that’s actually more to prevent malicious intent, so for instance, with click-based, where you have advertisers maliciously advertizing the product and then redirecting customers to a different landing page, that’s really why that that check is in place. But for most advertisers, that should be a non-issue.

Kalyan: Sounds good, and just to tee upon this plan, is this all same as how it is in Adwords?

Jamie: Yes. So Adwords also has those same checks. They require ‘http’ and ‘https’ and they do have this domain mis-match on policy check in place.

Kalyan: Excellent. Two follow up questions on, again, Upgraded URLs. The questions are: Is there a sunset date for Destination URL and what is the deadline to transition to Upgraded URLs?

Jamie: The sunset date for Destination URLs, we will do that more in tandem with the sunset times of V9. As we are ramping down V9, we also would like to ramp down Destination URL traffic. With V11, we hope to not…when we do have time to V11, we hope to not have any Destination URLs in the system. For the short term, by the end of summer, we will atleast hope that most advertisers will be able to migrate their URLs, upgrade URLs. With the appending holiday season, we understand that people would be crunched for time and we don’t want to force advertisers to touch their URLs in the holiday season.

If we do see that majority of advertisers still have not upgraded the URLs by that time, we will actually push that out, with your feedback and with your partnership to early of 2017 full holiday season. So short term, we would love to be able to migrate everyone before the start of the holiday season, so end of summer – August, September, October. If we do see that we’re pushing into that season, we don’t want to force advertisers to touch their URLs, because it is such a sensitive on-property, and then we will more than likely push that out into 2017.

Kalyan: Great. Clearly Jamie, the most popular guy today, with all the questions! There is more. Is API support going to be available for the Upgrade Toolbar, Upgraded URLs?

Jamie: For Upgrading URLs, we are looking to validate what that API info will look like. At the current moment, we do not have plans for a migration tool in the API. The reason is because…so you know that, I will love to have calls from any of those advertisers who actually have questions on that and why they would like a migration tool in the API. The reason why Google introduced that API is because when you do make modifications with ad copy or ad URL in Google, they actually recreate that entity. Bing version, their ads BingAds does not, so you are allowed to make inline updates in Bing and use the same unique identifiers such as an ad ID throughout the entire lifetime of that ad.

If you were to make changes in the Adwords to an ad copy or may be the Destination URL, what actually happens is that they would stop to lead to that entity and recreate it as an existing one. That model does not apply to Bing, which is why we chose not to create separate migration API because you can still update the existing ads without recreating the ads. I would love to talk more about that with any advertizer, so feel free to follow up our posted email address and in the chat to get in touch with us or email on the BingAds-pilot areas in the Appendix section at the end of the Part I slide. We’ll find out.

Kalyan: Thank you Jamie. There is two questions about API deadline for V9 deprication. We said Q2. We are looking at close to second week of June this year, as the end of support for V9 versions of Campaign, Bulk, Optimizer APIs and there was another question about: Will the reporting API….there was a question about, I guess, OR – will Reporting API and other APIs not said to be upgraded to V10, continue to allow ID password to be sent for authentication? When will OR be enforced? Not just the V9 APIs, even the V10 APIs will continue to support ID password for authentication. We have, will, in the plans with the exact date for enforcing OR or the MSA accounts rather. We don’t have timelines for those yet, but be assured that for now, we will continue to support both sorts of authentication. When we have more info, we’ll be sure to share those.

There is more questions coming in. If you have questions that we are not able to answer, we will do that, please reach out to your Account Manager or through the resources section that Tiffany is going to present towards the end. There is a lot of questions that we don’t know if we have the time to answer all of them, but we will take a few more and then I do want to give about five, ten minutes to Tiffany to go over the resources section. For now, let’s go some of the questions that are being asked: Is there a limit on number of sites that you guys will accept for Review Site Extensions? Joseph. Is there a limit on the number of sources for or even the number of the reviews that you would …for the Callout Extensions?

Joseph: So for a given campaign or adgroup, upto 20 separate Review Extensions can be associated with that campaign or adgroup.

Kalyan: Okay, thank you. Let’s see. There is a bunch of Upgrade URLs questions that I’m trying to pass. Does the unique keyword ID stay with the same URL values for a keyword or updated as well? I guess the answer is ‘Yes’ because the keyword ID’s don’t change. Next question is: So are ads mutable in BingAds, the Upgraded URLs are not going to change the ID, even if they don’t match the original Destination URL very well?

Joseph: One more time.

Kalyan: The question is: Are ads mutable in BingAds?

Joseph: Yes, they are. You can create a new ad.

Kalyan: The upgraded URLs are not going to change…and this is a question: The upgraded URLs are not going to change the ID, even if they don’t match the original Destination URL very well? Again, just like the previous question, the Upgraded URL process is not going to change the ID’s for your keywords or ads. If you can provide more clarity, we can try to answer that, but the ID’s won’t change. Will converting to Upgraded URLs trigger a review of ads, if the URLs are very similar to those original Destination URLs? So if somebody does it for the first time, will that trigger a review? So they have Destination URL and they upgrade to the new format, the Final URL, at that instance, will there be a one-time….?

Jamie: There will be a one-time review for most customers. Most customers, their ads will now be pulled out of rotation, will be an offhand review process. What that means is that the delivery status may change to “Approved Limited’, which means that the ad is still in the Options tool, is delivering, but if editorial aren’t positive if it does, see that, in consistency with the policies for Upgraded URLs, it may actually reject the ad later on. But the ads will contain the serve. If the URLs are fairly similar to, from the get-go, it shouldn’t be an issue and then we should be able to catch that in real time, before actually accepting the upgrade process.

Kalyan: Sounds good. Thanks Jamie. Let us get back to the resources section. There are a few other questions. I guess more detailed in…question. I will probably take this one more and then I do want to open it out for resources. Thank you so much for asking all these questions, all the great questions, by the way, and we’re trying to answer most of them. Like I said, if we can’t answer, you will hear from us. Please reach out to your Account Manager and you’ll have answers. One last question, again on Upgraded URLs: Do you think Bing auto-tagging? How does that affect the upgrade?

Jamie: If you’re using auto-tagging, your URLs will still be appended with the traditional UTM tags. The UTM content, UTM campaign, UTM term, UTM…the other one, UTM Resource and Medium. So what happens with auto-tag is that auto-tagging, we appended after the URL has been generated because of impression in click, so there will still be that same behavior today. In the case that, for an ad that’s using the tracking template and the Final URL, once the tracking template and the Final URL have been compatinated and generated, we will then append the URL auto-tagging on the end of that.

There has been some feedback regarding when to append auto-tagging, whether we should append it on the Final URL or the tracking template. From our perspective, we will only append auto-tagging after the URL has been generated. If you do have questions or concerns around that, for instance, of auto-tagging, please do let us know. We are actually open to feedback on that scenario and we have had discussions with advertisers and knowledgeable buyers, that could go either way. So we should be back, will catch you may be further to improve our…to provide more clarity on the scenario.

Kalyan: Okay. So I am just going to take one last question, I have one minute. Are there any plans to start showing shopping ads on mobile devices? And Neha, if you…can you answer that?

Neha: Absolutely. So currently we do show product ads or shopping ads on mobile. The issue is that the coverage is currently quite low, so people might not see enough volume from mobile devices. We are working on a plan to increase the coverage there, so that we increase the volume as well. But we do show product ads in mobile currently.

Kalyan: Thank you Neha for that answer. So let’s switch gears and have Tiffany walk us through the Resources section. Tiffany, over to you.

Tiffany: Alright. Thank you Kalyan, and again, thank you everybody for submitting that fantastic questions and the Resource is that, I wanted to point out we will definitely help you find answers to a lot of your questions. It has announcements on new features, our Sandbox environment and community box, just to name a few. You will find everything you need at developers.bingads.microsoft.com. I would definitely recommend bookmarking that site and checking it regularly for updates. And Eric will also be sure to include the Resource link in the Q & A Chat window and you can see here on the slides and we will also be sure to give everybody access to this deck, so you’ll have access to all these Resource links as well.

And another way to get information is we do have a monthly API read-out and a quarterly newsletter, where you will find API alerts, new features and updates and current highlights in betas and highlights from our blog, so if you are interested in signing up for that, please send an email request to bingadsapi@microsoft.com and we’ll be sure to get you added to that list and if you are interested in signing up for pilots for API testing, please contact bingads-pilots@microsoft.com for pilot enablement. This is the email that Jamie also mentioned that you can send any questions for Upgraded URLs and he will be able to respond to that email. We will be opening up the pilot for Upgraded URLs next month and the pilot for App. Install Ads will open in April and Image Extensions is actually available today.

So thank you again everyone for joining our February, Quarterly API Call. The next call will be held in late May, early June and we look forward to sharing the next round of updates with you at that time. With that, we will conclude the call.

Thank you.