[Transcript] Bing Ads API Expanded Text Ads Workshop

After briefly sharing Bing’s interest in Expanded Text Ad up during the Bing Ads Quarterly API Call – June 2016, Jamie Chung (Program Manager, Bing Ads Campaign) further gives an overview of the new ad format, attends to some of the common FAQs and shares timelines of expected pilot run. All this was shared during a workshop hosted by Tiffany Sanders (Operations Program Manager, API Partners).

You can view the video of the workshop here.

Here is the transcript of the video for your reference

Introduction:

Tiffany: Hello and welcome everyone to the Bing Ads Expanded Text Ads Workshop. Before we get started, I would like to point out some features on your console to give you the best viewing experience possible. The webcast console that you see is customizable, so you can click the content widgets on your screen and move them around or size them for optimal viewing for your screen size. 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 encourage you to submit text questions at any time using the ‘Q & A’ widget in the lower left. We’ll be trying to answer them as we go, but we also plan on leaving ten to fifteen minutes at the end to answer as many questions as possible. If we run out of time and do not answer all of your questions, our API team will follow up offline. You will also find a ‘Resource’ widget in the upper left corner that houses all the resources including the presentation from today that is already available for download.

There are links to stay in touch with us at the end of the deck. 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 would love to keep you on the know as much as possible and this is a great way to do so.

An On-demand version of this webcast will be available approximately 24 to 72 hours after the webcast and can be accessed at the same link that you registered as well as being posted in our Bing Ads API YouTube channel. If your colleagues or friends couldn’t make it this time, feel free to share the same registration link and after registering, they will get to watch the On-demand version.

So now that your screens are optimized, I would like to welcome you again and thank you all for joining the Expanded Text Ads Workshop. In today’s call, we are excited to share with you information on this new ad type. Our goal is to make sure that you walk away with a clear understanding of the differences between Traditional Text Ads and Expanded Text Ads as well as our timeline for release.

Before we begin, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you to our presenters. My name is Tiffany Sanders and I will be your host. I am an Operations Project Manager, working on the API Partner business team. I have here with me Jamie Chung, who has been part of the Bing Ads family for over two years, primarily focusing on Campaign Management experiences for end-advertisers. He is currently focused on improving URL management to Upgraded URLs and introducing new and updated ad products for advertisers.

Our camp Tarik will be answering your questions via the Chat window throughout the call today. Please note that the feature discussed in today’s call is in early planning; therefore dates and information is subject to change. Without further ado, I will send it over to Jamie where he will walk you through the Expanded Text Ads Overview, SOAP API and Bulk API schema, Must-Knows and FAQs and Timelines, leaving about ten to fifteen minutes for questions. Jamie, take it away.

Jamie Chung,Program Manager, Bing Ads Campaign:

Jamie: Awesome Tiffany. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for making time to join us today on the Expanded Text Ads API workshop. So as you may be familiar with, this is a new change of little adding compatibility for this new ad format in the Bing Ads platform. So we’ll walk you through what it will look like, what this will actually…impact it on the API SOAP as well as the Bulk schemas, go to some Timelines and any room for questions from you guys as well.

So little bit of persp. about Expanded Text Ads, so Expanded Text Ads will be treated as the new ad type in the Bing Ads platform. This is an always mob. optimized ad, which will work seamlessly in desktop, tablets and mobile devices.

The perk of our Expanded Text Ads is that it gives advertisers greater control for their ad text. They can create more compelling actions, call-to-action; they can more customize how they want their ad titles to be for customers, instead of having the Bing algo trying to [cruise] to an ad text and give you more long ad titles.

We followed through some research that longer ads do look more like organic results, yield in more clicks, so this very much a uplift from the customers into the CTR and clicks. We hope that more advertisers will be ready to take advantage of this, this additional real estate on the Bing SERP. You kind of go-between, the differences between the Standard Text Ads today that we have …Traditional Text Ads and the new format is just…I will briefly touch on those.

Traditionally, we have the ‘Ad Title’, which is 25 characters. With Expanded Text Ads, we’ll be introducing same initial standards of 230 character to ‘Ad Titles’ which would then be separated by a hyphen. So really the advertiser gets to creatively choose 60 characters of their choosing, realistically one….this is actually….display on the SERP will be 63, when you consider the space, I mean the hyphen actually can [inaudible 0:04:37] these two.

Second will be increase in the ad text from 71 characters which is today in the Bing Ads platform to 80 characters from the actual…. Likewise the Display URL, we will be following suit in the pursuing Upgraded URLs in this fashion. What this means is that we will automatically generate the domain from the Final URL as provided. If a Mobile URL is also provided, we will still generate the URL for the domain name from the Final URL and then we’ll introduce the same to customizable URL path, which will be path 1 and path 2, both of 15 characters in length.

Next we will touch on the Bulk and API SOAP schemas. So this is a very advanced preview of what this will look like in our Bulk API. We are still working on publishing the documentation and if you guys do subscribe to API newsletters as well as request some pilot access, once this documentation is ready, we will be providing you the actual link in MSDN to follow suit.

So again, this new ad type is treated as a new Bulk row, so this we would call “Expanded Text Ads”. This will still inherit all the same Upgraded URLs properties, this Final URLs, Mobile URLs, Tracking Templates as well as Custom Parameter fields. For customers who are using the API today, we still recommend you to continue to use the ad enum, in your Bulk download into request. This will…we will also avenue values for the different columns of title part 1, title part 2, path 1, path 2 as well in the Bulk sheet.

So for ad operations, obviously title 1 and title 2 are both required; path 1 and path 2 are optional. You can choose a path 1 without actually defining the path. You can choose a path 2 without first defining the path 1 and the same kind of validation to go for Final URLs, Mobile URLs, Custom Parameters and Tracking Templates.

In terms of the Campaign Management API, this will be a sneak peak in what a schema will look like. The Expanded Text Ad format will still inherit from the base ad entity we have in API today. We will still introduce the path 1, path 2. We will be reusing the same text field and then will be introduced in title part 1 and title part 2. The very important distinction is that this is different from just using the traditional, like the title, field. These are four new columns that we are introducing, so path 1, path 2, title part 1 and title part 2, which are actually four distinctively new columns, not existent in the current ad model today.

You can still use the existing six API service operations to ‘AddAds’, ‘DeleteAds’, ‘UpdateAds’ and so forth. We will just need to pass a new ad enum which is Expanded Text Ads to specifically define this object. In terms of the reporting API, we will be adding support for three of our reports at the get-go. Additional reports will come as we continue the pilot and we beta test this ….with advertisers. We do definitely encourage you to use the AdType column so that you can distinguish that this is an Expanded Text Ad. This will be treated differently from the AdTypes for Standard Text Ads, so you will easily be able to make that distinction in your reports and filter and sort as needed.

So well then segway into Must-Knows. These are kind of some things that we have been going through, through our discovery, through talking to you guys on API customers, through our…just talking about direct customer advertisers as well and these are the things that we just wanted to make sure everyone is aware of, as everything about this feature. These are still being in draft, so we do welcome your feedback so we can actually help to build a product that you’re able to a – code against in a very timely and easy manner, and b – it would actually give advertisers what they are looking for.

So the first baby we want to cover, just some Pilot Flags feature, for Upgraded URLs, the pilot enum is 194; for Expanded Text Ads, the pilot will be 275. We have an API service operation today, get customer pilot features which you’ll be able to programmatically detect if a customer you’re calling against has this feature or not, so we do take a…we do want you to take advantage of that API today.

Some questions that we have had, been getting from customers are: Is Upgraded URLs required for Expanded Text Ads? Yes, we will be requiring for you to use Upgraded URLs if you want to use Expanded Text Ads. So that means the Tracking Templates and Custom Parameters will be inherited likewise for those text ads who have Upgraded URLs. On the contrary though, we are now requiring you to migrate some entire account to Upgraded URLs to use Expanded Text Ads.

So the customer just wanted to run Expanded Text Ads with Upgraded URLs, and still have the Traditional Text Ads using Destination URLs, we do support that, makes for the compatibility, to give you that flexibility too so that you can actually fully and thoroughly plan your migration. That kind of segways into the question two being able to support both mixed modes, so you can actually have both entities in your campaigns and ad groups, so then you will not be requiring your campaigns to only having Expanded Text Ads or only having Text Ads. You can actually mix and match this as you like them.

The second bits of Must-Knows that we have been having some feedback on, is support for {param 1} ,{param 2} and {param 3}. We will be formalizing, communications sent out that we will be very heavily discouraging the use of param 1, 2 and 3 in URLs. The way that we would like to think of param 1, 2, 3 is only to be used in that ad copy, so thinking about ad title – ad title 1, ad title 2 in ad text, we will be discouraging, probably prohibiting the use in future collaborations for param 1, 2, 3 to be used in the Destination URL, Final URL and Mobile URLs. So be cognizant and be aware of that, that change. Then we will formalize that with the API as well.

Some questions from customers on automatic migration from Text Ads to Expanded Text Ads.

We don’t have any plans currently to build any sort of streamlined or migration for Standard Text Ads to Expanded Text Ads. We are encouraging that customers actually take this time to rethink their creatives, to look heavily at the type of ad copy that they are seeing.

These two AdTypes will perform differently and the algorithms and engines will treat them differently to better optimize those use cases. So there will be some work needed from us, some advertisers to rewrite their copy or rethink how they want to take advantage of title 2 and the increase, once we do it, encourage you to use the opportunity now. And then for how to get your customers in pilot, if you are a SEM Agency Tool or you are managing a book of business for all the customers, we are currently not accepting pilot customers from….we are not accepting pilot requests from those customers at the moment. This call is definitely more API-focused for API community and partners and we are accepting API pilot participants as early as of today.

We still have bits later out with constant timelines, so for direct customers, we are not accepting pilots; for API consumers and customers who use the API directly, we will love to have you on board and be in pilot as soon as possible, which brings us to the timelines, so whenever we actually think about rolling this out. So as of today, this is June, so we will go through a series of….next few months will be happening. A reminder that this week, June 30th, V9 sunset is happening for a few services, so Ad Intelligence, Bulk, Campaign Management and Optimizer.

There will be a link to the API blog. It probably already is and how to best migrate your APIs from V9 to V10 for these effective services, so that’s just a friendly reminder there. In early August, more than likely very late July, but early August, for the sake of time, we will have full support in the API, so Bulk and SOAP will have SDK support, so for those reasons, C# or Java or Python, and then we will also be actually enabling customers, API customers into their test accounts.

We will have a link in the deck for your sign up, just to provide us with your CIDs for your test accounts, your email address, so we can actually inform you when these documentation is published in MSDN.

More than likely in the next week or so we will publish on MSDN to give you that more concrete collateral and then once you are ready to actually accept customers into pilot, for the API Sandbox and for the live end-points of production, we will start enabling that, let you guys know through your technical account managers. In the August time frame, we will then like to start piloting with select English US-based customers. We will actually have full platform support in Bing Ads, so support in the Web UI, in Bing Ads Editor, using our blog tools, and obviously through our API, so we will definitely be leveraging those customers who may be have to provide a support by August time frame.

We would like to bring their demand to reason Google Import or just want a test of this privately for Expanded Text Ads. Later in the Calendar Year, so thinking Fall and Winter, we will be continuing to roll out to English-US as well as the remaining English-speaking markets with the hope of also rolling out to worldwide in 2016 time frame. Sweet. That’s pretty much all I have in terms of a brief draft in what we’re thinking. Definitely we will love your feedback, we will love to hear your questions so we can get you some answers as well.

Tiffany: Alright. Thank you, Jamie. So please continue to submit your questions and Jamie and I are going to take a look at what questions have already come in so far. So one question that we have here is: Can you expose the calculated Display URL in the API or do you want API clients to calculate the Display URL? If the latter, can we get more details on how the Display URL is calculated? Are there any exceptions to the calculation?

Jamie: So at the moment, we would evaluate in how we will handle the truncations for the scenario where the customer’s domain name is super-long, so may be very very long domain name.com, where you may have a path 1 and path 2, we will more than likely be able to truncate and just do an ellipsis on the Bing SERP. That is still being discussions and when we have a more formalized answer on that, we will publish in MSDN.

We won’t be requiring customers as in API consumers to calculate….so we won’t expose, so like the calculations in the Display URL, the only input would just be for path 1, path 2 where you are limited by 15 characters and then the domain name, the length of that domain name will just be calculated on our side. If there is heavy feedback to actually expose an API like that, do let us know so we can put that in consideration.

Tiffany: Alright. So the next question is: Will Expanded Text Ads be available on Bing Partner site?

Jamie: Yes, so we’re looking to roll this out on our Syndication, Native and Content networks as well. At first, more than likely just Search, but the expectation is that all the Bing network sites will have Expanded Text Ads and there will be a further option.

Tiffany: Right. Next question: Is Bing determining which accounts will be whitelisted or do we have as advertisers need to request, opt into the pilot?

Jamie: As advertisers do reach out to your account managers and let them know that you are interested in piloting. Based on that interest, so we will work with the account managers to determine who will get whitelisted first. Obviously we can’t enable everyone at once and we will be very selective when we do enablements. So do reach out through your account manager or technical account manager, if you have one. Once we do have [opening] sign-ups publicly, we will publish on the consumer blog for you guys to take a look at.

Tiffany: And another question here: Will two Partners be able to control ad test in the Expanded Text Ad feature in Bing Ads?

Jamie: Two partners will not be able to control when customers get enabled. You definitely have to partner with us, so we can actually have a joint communication. Ideally what we want to do is that if you want all your customers to wait until your platform is fully supported of XDA, we can have a discussion about that and we can do a joint release where we will only enable your customers in the pilot once you are ready. For those customers who aren’t using two providers, we would more than likely, can still onboard them without…we’re supposing they aren’t using two providers or two integrators.

Tiffany: And then there is some questions just needed clarification around the Upgraded URL migration.

Jamie: Yeah, so with Upgraded URLs, we are not forcing any migrations of URLs this year. This is just based on your feedback and just from the burden from advertisers. So what will happen is that we will more than likely bring Upgraded URLs to general availability during the summer time frame. What that means is customers will still have the option to use Destination URL in addition to the Upgraded URLs. Now if a customer wants to use Expanded Text Ads, they can only set up Expanded Text Ads with Final URLs. They won’t have that mix mode capability that Standard Text Ads have.

Tiffany: And then another clarifying question around, if the Display URL for the Standard Text Ads will be available for download in Report?

Jamie: That is something we will look into right now. More than likely we want to surface that to advertisers because it just makes the Report more complete. At the moment, may be not for initial pilot, but that’s something we will definitely look into building as we approach general availability.

Tiffany: And some folks are wondering if the Display URL will work if they had to redirect in the Destination URL? So will it be able to call a domain from the Final landing page?

Jamie: So when you are using a Destination URL, that is only related to Standard Text Ads that are not using Upgraded URLs, so Display URLs in Expanded Text Ads will only work if you’re using Upgraded URLs and Final URLs. The rule of thumb is that you are allowed one domain name per ad group, so all your domain names in the single ad group must have one single….all the ads in your ad group must have one single domain. Using that juristic, the Display URLs will more than likely all have the same domain name as well. That policy is in effect for both Destination URLs and Final URLs, but Display URLs really only work in Expanded Text Ads when you are using Final URLs.

Tiffany: Alright. So will Expanded Text Ads serve at any time prior to August with whitelisted or pilot account to test increases in performance?

Jamie: Yes. we will be doing some internal testing with some select accounts to make sure that we actually have the proper algorithms in place. We don’t want to bring this mainstream, until we have full confidence that we are delivering the right frames to advertisers. This will take some time as the algorithms learn and machine lang. does adopt to new Text Ads, so once we start piloting with customers in August, we will be doing some lightened traffic so some customers will see a round-top approach with their Expanded Text Ads being served once they are whitelisted.

Tiffany: And then we have a question around Farm advertisers: Will the single domain apply to Farmer advertisers who use Vanity URLs?

Jamie: We’re still evaluating the impact of Farmer customers with regards to Expanded Text Ads. Given that the FDA requires around 45 to 60 days of ad approvals, we are definitely working to partner with those Farmer customers with regards to what’s the best experience for them, so they can actually also take advantage of Expanded Text Ads. At the moment, we don’t have a complete story of Farmer customers in the moment, but that’s definitely on our radar.

Tiffany: And then people are wondering what it’s going to look like on Mobile, how will display on mobile devices and with a longer text fit on smaller screen?

Jamie: At the moment, our Bing experience of mobile devices that we will just continue to wrap the text. As we get more advertisers and as the algorithms learn more, they will may be more than likely do some treatments on the Bing SERP for mobile devices to see how they can better optimize the experience.

Tiffany: Will Expanded Text Ads be preferred over Standard Text Ads when serving?

Jamie: At the moment there will be no distinction.

As we ramp more customers up, there will be a slight preference to start using Expanded Text Ads over Standard Text Ads. But it’s going to pilot phase, more than likely not.

And we will more than likely also invite customers to ramp down the traffic for Standard Text Ads. As they ramp up their traffic for Standard Text Ads, may be moving some of that demand shift over, but on the get-go, there will be no preference intrinsically over Standard Text Ads. The algorithms harbor will start learning and start leaning towards Expanded Text Ads, but that will take some time for them to adopt.

Tiffany: Alright. And will all ad extensions serve on Expanded Text Ads?

Jamie: Yes. All existing ad extensions for Standard Text Ads will also apply to Expanded Text Ads.

Tiffany: So this is a follow-up question to an earlier question: If select account leverage tool, can a tool provider see if there is…to know when those shifts might happen?

Jamie: Yes, that’s something we are very aware of and that’s something we are pretty proactive about, letting the account managers know, letting the tool providers know that these accounts are good for changes. We do encourage you to also connect with your technical account manager, connect with your account manager so that we are also in the loop. It’s important that yes, we’re practically having those discussions and we also do practically try to have those customers who are managed by an account manager or by a tool, tool provider, anyone from the API, so let’s keep that communication open. I think it’s worked very well so far and we would like to see that continue.

Tiffany: Will the SERP show both Expanded Text Ads and Text Ads?

Jamie: Yes. The SERP can show both ad formats. As we start to wrap up traffic for Expanded Text Ads, we will expect that you see more XDAs as opposed to Standard Text Ads.

Tiffany: Alright. Can we find a pilot program for Sandbox account?

Jamie: Yes, for Sandbox accounts, you will be having to sign up in the deck where it’s like Qualtrics, so where you will be able to sign up and provide your customer IDs. Once we are ready for Sandbox and also production APIs, we will then be enabling your customer so you can actually start hitting the end-points and regenerating your proxies.

Tiffany: What’s the differences between Bing and Google Expanded Ads?

Jamie: The differences are non….the models are very similar; the models are the same for Expanded Text Ads in both engines. The reason for this is to make it easy for you to…you reuse your Expanded Text Ads in Bing Ads. But there are intrinsic differences between the audiences that do use Bing and in Google, so performances will vary just based on vertical and just based on usage patterns, but the models from the API standpoint, looking at both SOAP and Bulk are same.

Tiffany: And then when we talk about the timing, are you looking more early or late Q4 for roll out?

Jamie: That will be, I would say, in the middle. Early Q4, I guess, would be very September- October; may be actually around that time. Ideally is that we want to have very significant percent of the traffic, using Expanded Text Ads, as we go into the holiday season, so we expect that November – December where they are the most busiest times for the advertiser’s peak season. We should have significant traffic using the ad format. So we do encourage you to start thinking about how this actually affects you. We will see advertisers who are very interested in this feature and this new model change to want to have support.

Tiffany: And let’s see: Will we be able to have specific Mobile Expanded Ads?

Jamie: At the moment, no. We will love to hear your feedback on what you think specific Mobile Expanded Ads will look like or what you would like them to do.

The idea behind Expanded Text Ads is that it’s always mobile-optimized format. It’s the same format you can use on mobile, desktop and tablet and the engines will be smart enough to detect what device a customer is searching from, their search patterns, their history and better optimized experience on this, the Bing SERP based on the device.

Tiffany: And then some more mobile questions: Are mobile-preferred ads being sunsetted with this move to Expanded Text Ads?

Jamie: At the moment, we don’t have any concrete plans on mobile-preferred ads being sunsetted. We will more than likely move with the industry standard when that timelines just come up.

Tiffany: Alright. And then there is a question I am asking you to elaborate a little bit, on the character limit for the Display URL.

Jamie: So the character limit for Display URL is interesting. The only requirement from the API’s standpoint is the path 1, path 2 so that’s the 15-character limits in path 1 and the 15-character limits in path 2. We will not be penalizing the advertisers for having long domain names; that is not the intent. There will be some exemptions that need to be made based on the lengths of customer’s domains and we will be treating those as case-by-case, as they are brought out, so we can actually have a better understanding of which customers we run in…scenario.

So from a Display URL standpoint, the only creative control you have is for the path 1 and path 2 fields which is 30-characters, exclusive of the slash, so we think about path 1, path 2 that’s 31 characters. 15 characters path 1 – slash – and 15 characters path 2, so it’s 31 character that you will have implicit control over. The other part of the Display URL is that we will be generating the domain name from the Final URL. We’re looking to evaluate if we will also include sub-domains in the order generations. If you are using Travel.Contestar.com, ideally it has a Final URL, ideally you want that to be generated on the Bing SERP, so that’s some other changes that …we are looking to do, based on your feedback.

Tiffany: Are there any device preference copy for Expanded Text Ads?

Jamie: We have dynamic text substitution, can tag, you can use like, “If mobile” and “If not mobile”. I believe those also work in ad text, so you would be able to still do some tweaking based on the ad type for Expanded Text Ads.

Tiffany: Alright. Well, Jamie, we had a lot of really great questions. Thank you everybody for submitting those. I do want to share some resources, so you can continue to find answers to your questions and we have answers on your features, or you can find information on our Sandbox environment. You will find everything you need to know at developers.bingads.microsoft.com. Be sure to bookmark it and check it regularly for updates.

You can also reference our resource links in the ‘Resource’ window. If you’re looking for more information, please be sure to sign up for our monthly API readout and quarterly newsletter, where you will find API alerts, new features and updates, current pilot and betas and highlights from our blog, and you can sign up by sending an email request to: bingadsapi@microsoft.com.

You can also ask questions via Twitter and we would love to get feedback on features at our ‘User Voice’ page as well as the Bing Ads community forum and on MSDN. So thank you again everyone for joining the Expanded Text Ads workshop. Stay tuned for the next API call to be held in September, where we look forward to sharing next round of updates with you at that time. With that, we will conclude the call.

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