Import Bing Ads data into Google Analytics

If you promote your website using Bing Ads and other advertising services, you can easily and conveniently analyze and compare the performance of those campaigns in Google Analytics. In this article, we explain how to get data from Bing Ads into Google Analytics.

To see data from Bing Ads campaigns in Google Analytics reports, you need to add UTM tags to your ad links and set up cost data importing. After that, you can:

1. Track the number of users, number of transactions, and revenue from Bing Ads and compare this data with data on traffic from other sources.​
   

2. Analyze the effectiveness of different advertising channels by comparing clicks, impressions, costs, CTR, CPC, and ROAS​

3. See how many conversions Bing Ads brought.​
   

4. Create your own reports with the metrics, filters, and segments you need – for example, to compare ROAS across all CPC campaigns.​
   

UTM tags are code snippets that are appended to ad campaign links and contain information about the traffic source, ad campaign, ad keywords, etc. When a person follows a link to your website that contains UTM tags, all this information can be tracked by your web analytics system.

To add UTM tags automatically, you can enable automatic markup in your Bing Ads account. To do this, click on the gear icon in the upper right corner and select Accounts & Billing. Then, in the Account tab, click on the edit icon.

In the window that opens, check the box next to Add UTM tags to my landing page URLs. If you’ve already manually added tags to your campaigns, select Keep my existing tags. Bing Ads will keep the old tags and just add missing ones. If you haven’t created UTM tags yet or you want to completely replace your existing tags with automatically generated ones, select the Replace all existing tags option.

Save the changes by clicking the Save button.

After that, the Bing Ads system will automatically add the following UTM tags to all target URLs in your ad campaigns:

For example, a link for a paid campaign in Bing Ads after autolart might look like this: http://www.site.com/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=discount&utm_content=accessories&utm_term=smart_watch

If your site doesn’t support autodistribution, you’ll need to add UTM tags manually. You can learn more about how to do this in the Google Analytics help section.

Information obtained with the help of UTM tags will help you know which campaigns lead users to your site. But it won’t show the advertising return for Bing Ads – for that, you’ll need cost data. This data can be uploaded to Google Analytics in several ways. In this article, we’ll look at two ways, starting with the simplest and most convenient.

Whatever import method you choose, the first step will be the same. In Google Analytics, create a dataset into which waste from the advertising service will be loaded.

Open the admin panel in your Google Analytics account, select Import data in the resource settings, and click the Create button:

Then select Cost data and click Next. Give a name to the dataset – for example, “Expenses from Bing Ads” – and indicate the idea in which you intend to use this data:

Now you need to decide on the schema for the loaded data. By default, there are three required parameters: date, channel, and source. Add other metrics you want to see in your reports, such as cost, clicks, impressions, campaign, and keywords.

Next, choose an action for importing duplicate data (data with the same keys and for the same period as that already loaded in Google Analytics). If you want to add new data alongside the old, leave the Summation option checked. If you want to update the data, select Overwrite.

After you click Save, a new dataset will appear in your GA resource settings.

Now go to OWOX BI, and in the Pipeline tab, click Create a flow. Select the Bing Ads data source:

Grant access to your Bing Ads and Google Analytics accounts, select the resource and dataset to which the expenses will be uploaded, and click Next:

Specify the date from which to start importing cost data, select the Google Analytics view you need and your project in OWOX BI, and click Create flow:

Done. Cost data will appear in your reports within 36 hours. It takes up to 12 hours for data to be processed in OWOX BI, plus up to 24 hours for data to be processed in Google Analytics. For a free OWOX BI Start plan, data processing on the OWOX side can take up to 36 hours.

You can try cost data import from Bing Ads to Google Analytics for free.

You can also prepare a CSV file with cost data and manually upload it to Google Analytics. You’ll have to repeat this procedure each time you need fresh reports.

We’ve described how to do this above.

In the Reports tab, select the Campaign report type. In the Show (unit of time) field, select Day to split the data by day. Then specify the reporting period, time zone, and CSV format in which you’ll upload the file.

In the What to report on field, select the campaigns for which you want to upload data:

Next, in the Choose your columns drop-down list, select the parameters you want to see in Google Analytics reports. It’s important that they fully coincide with the data schema you specified when you created the dataset for importing into Google Analytics.

After that, click the Download button to download the CSV file with the data you've selected. Open it, add the missing ga: source and ga: medium columns, and fill them with the values bing and cpc respectively. Rename the rest of the columns in the file so they match the Google Analytics datasheet:

• ga:date
• ga:medium
• ga:source
• ga:adcost
• ga:adclicks
• ga:impressions
• ga:campaign
• ga:keyword

You’ll also need to edit the date format. Bing Ads reports use the dd/mm/yyyy format. It must be changed to yyyymmdd.

As a result, you’ll get something like this table:

Save the table in CSV format to upload to Google Analytics.

Open your Google Analytics dataset and select Manage Uploads:

Upload your CSV file with Bing Ads data. If all the fields are filled in correctly, you’ll see a message saying that the upload was successful. Otherwise, Google Analytics will report an error and show what needs to be fixed.

Done. Your data will appear in reports within 24 hours.

P.S. In your Google Analytics account, you will now have information about advertising campaigns, user actions on your site, and online transactions. With the help of this data, you can draw conclusions about the effectiveness of advertising channels and manage your marketing budget. This is good but not perfect because there are still returns, canceled orders, and offline communications with customers that, by default, don’t fall into Google Analytics.

To analyze complete data from all points of contact with your customers, set up end-to-end analytics using OWOX BI by merging your data in Google BigQuery. 

Book a free demo and we'll tell you more about all the OWOX features that will be useful for your business.