Import Bing Ads Data into Google Analytics 4

If you promote your website using Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads), as well as other advertising platforms, you can easily and conveniently analyze and compare the performance of those campaigns in Google Analytics 4.

Tracking Microsoft Ads in Google Analytics 4 is an easy and convenient way to evaluate the performance of your Microsoft Ads campaigns, analyze, and compare with the other advertising platforms, optimize cross-channel budget allocation, and pinpoint marketing opportunities.

In this updated article, updated in 2024 we'll explain how to get your data from Bing Ads loaded into Google Analytics 4, how you can use dynamic URL parameters to gain a deeper understanding of your campaign's performance, and how to automate your marketing reporting.

To see data from Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) campaigns in GA4 reports, you need to add UTM tags to your ad links and set up cost data importing. 

After that, you can build the following report:

Track the number of users, number of conversions or transactions, and total revenue from Micrisoft Ads campaigns and compare this data with data on traffic from other sources - for example, twitter ads.

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

See how many conversions Microsoft Ads brought to your website.

In the attribution report, you can see the conversion paths, and evaluate the effectiveness of Microsoft Ads in the whole user journey.​

You can also create your own custom reports with the metrics, filters, and segments you need to evaluate the performance of your advertising or marketing overall – for example, to compare ROAS across all paid 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.

In Microsoft Ads, UTM parameters are called the final URL suffix, which is a feature that allows you to track specific information about your ad’s performance. 

By adding a URL parameter field to the end of your landing page URL, you can include variables such as keyword, match type, and ad ID. You can get the UTM-builder that works great for GA4 below:

However, manually creating UTM codes for each ad campaign via the Campaign URL Builder tool may not be the best direction to follow.

If you’re looking to really win your marketing game, you need robust tracking with dynamic URL parameters, that can provide you with even more detailed information in Google Analytics 4. Additionally, you can generate hardcoded values on the ad level, which saves time and streamlines the tagging process.

The great thing about the final URL suffix is that it can be added at various levels, including the account, campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword levels. However, to get the most out of this feature, it’s best to leverage Microsoft Ads’ dynamic URL parameters and set the final URL parameters at the account level.

To do this, go to your Microsoft ads account, click on settings in the left bar, and select Account Level Options.

Next, find Auto-tagging of UTM below and check the box next to Add UTM tags to my destination URLs to enable automated configuration of the landing page URLs.

If you’ve already manually added tags to your campaigns, select Keep my existing tags and add those that are missing. Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads) will keep the old codes and just add the 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.

Also, allow auto-tagging of your campaigns with Click ID (MSCLKID) to allow conversion tracking so the ad platform can learn from your conversions and optimize ads for better performance.

Don't forget to save the changes by clicking the Save button below.

Also, you can fill in the Final URL suffix with the parameters you want to use, or keep it clean if you want Bing Ads to configure UTM tags by default.

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

Now that we have the necessary values, let’s construct a final URL parameter that will provide detailed insights to effectively track Microsoft / Bing Ads in Google Analytics 4.

Unfortunately, as of today, you won't be able to measure results on the ad group or keyword level in Google Analytics 4. This is the GA4 limitation.

If you are tired of manual reporting, and you need to get the ROAS & CPO reports built with the keyword level granularity - stay on top of your ad performance with OWOX BI.

Note: 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 4 help section.

Just imagine, with the power of UTM tags, you'd have insider knowledge on which campaigns are effectively driving users to your site! Isn't that a game-changer?

But it won’t show the advertising return for Bing / Microsoft Ads – for that, you’ll need cost data that are available in your Microsoft Ads Account.

This data can be uploaded to Google Analytics 4 in several ways. In this article, we’ll look at two ways, starting with the simplest and most convenient.

Let’s start with the manual way of importing cost data into Google Analytics 4.

You can prepare a CSV file with your Microsoft ads cost data and manually upload it to Google Analytics 4. You’ll have to repeat this procedure each time you need fresh reports (eg. every day, once a week) and you will have to follow exactly the same process for all of the other non-Google advertising platforms you use to drive traffic to the website.

In the Reports tab, go to Default Reports and select the Campaign report name and Perfromance report type.

First, modify the list of columns by adding the Date field to split the data by day.

Then specify the reporting period,

Finally, schedule the delivery frequency by setting up:

1. Toggle scheduling
2. Select frequency
3. Select the time
4. Add your email address to get the report
5. Select format in which you’ll upload the file (typically csv)
6. Check the box to Include report as an email attachment

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:

1. ga:date
2. ga:medium
3. ga:source
4. ga:adcost
5. ga:adclicks
6. ga:impressions
7. ga:campaign
8. ga:campaignid
9. ga:keyword

You’ll also need to edit the date format. Bing Ads reports use the dd/mm/yyyy format.

NOTE: The date must be changed to yyyymmdd format to be accessible by GA4

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

Save the table in CSV format to upload it to Google Analytics 4 dataset.

Open the admin panel in your Google Analytics 4 account, select Import data in the resource settings, and click the Create button:

Give a name to the dataset – for example, “Microsoft Ads cost data” – and select Cost data:

Choose the import source. In this case it will be Manual CSV upload and upload CSV file and click Next:

Now you need to decide on the schema for the loaded data. By default, there are five required parameters: date, campaign channel, campaign source, campaign name, and campaign ID. Add other metrics you want to see in your reports, such as cost, clicks, impressions. You need to map imported and analytics fields and click Import.

If all the fields are filled in correctly, you’ll see a message saying that the upload was successful.

Otherwise, Google Analytics 4 will report an error and show what needs to be fixed. Your data will appear in GA4 reports within 24 hours.

Sounds too complicated to repeat this process again and again manually, but you still want to measure the Bing ad performance and compre with other traffic sources in Google Analytics 4 interface? Hack yes, let’s automate this whole process just one time and get the fresh data uploaded to GA4 for reporting daily.

In Google Analytics 4, create a dataset into which waste from the advertising service will be loaded.

Start OWOX BI FREE Trial and in the Pipeline tab, click Create NEW Pipeline. Select Bing Ads as the data source:

Grant access to your Microsoft Ads and Google BigQuery accounts, select the dataset to which the ad expenses would be uploaded, and click Next.

Specify the date from which to start importing Bing Ads cost data and click Create pipeline.

As we’ve mentioned in the previous method of manual import, the structure of the Microsoft Ads Cost data is different from the Google Analytics 4 data structure.

That’s why you need to transform the data, merge it with the other platforms’ cost data (eg. Facebook ads or Twitter ads data) prepare for reporting, and make them GA4 accessible.

That’s why we’ve prepared a data transformation template to blend cost data from multiple sources together and make them GA4-accessible.

Open the Workspace page, click on the ‘New’ button, and select the ‘Transformation’ item.

On the next screen, you will see a bunch of prebuilt Templates. In order to get your Microsoft / Bing Ads costs into GA4, select the ‘Blended Adspend + GA4 Cost Data Import’ template.

Choose this template and you’ll get a BigQuery table with the required data formatted in Google Analytics 4 structure. Click the ‘Create transformation’ button.

Just follow the steps you see on the screen and schedule your transformation to run every day at 7 am or so.

1. On the Workspace page, click the ‘New’ button and select the 'Pipeline' option in a drop-down menu:

2. As a source, select 'Google BigQuery':

3. Choose pipeline 'Google Analytics 4 (via SFTP) → Google BigQuery':

And click the 'Create & Setup' button:

4. The new pipeline has been successfully created in ‘Draft’ status. To start data import, you'll need to configure pipeline settings, including the source of your data, SFTP server configuration, and destination data format.

5. Set up source data:

5.1. Click on the ‘Source data’ section.

5.2. In the opened dialog, click on the ‘Select a dataset’ section.

5.3. Then you will see another dialog, where you can choose one of the shared datasets in the list. If this list is empty, or you didn’t find the desired dataset, you can click the ‘Grant access…’ button and add a new dataset following the instructions.

5.4. Click the ‘Save’ button to close the second dialog.

5.5. Specify the BigQuery table, where you have prepared data for importing to Google Analytics 4.

5.6. Click the ‘Save’ button to apply your changes.

5.7. If all is done correctly, the dialog will close, and in the "Source data" section you will see a green marker with the name project.dataset.table.

6. Configure SFTP-server in combination with creating a new Data source in Google Analytics 4.

6.1. Please, open two browser tabs: the first one with the OWOX BI pipeline page, and the second one with the GA4 Admin page.

6.2. In the OWOX BI, click on the ‘SFTP server…’ section.

6.3. In the opened 'Setting up Data source in Google Analytics' dialog, you will see three sections:

1. Required steps in the Google Analytics 4 interface.
2. SFTP server username, that you need to copy here and paste into GA4 Data source settings
3. SFTP server URL

Now you need to create a dataset in Google Analytics 4.

Open the admin panel in your GA4 account, select Import data in the resource settings, and click the Create button:

Give a name to the dataset – for example, “Microsoft Ads cost data” – and select Cost data:

Select SFTP as the import source:

• fill SFTP server username - required
• fill SFTP server url - required
• fill SFTP comment
• set up schedule

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

After you click Create & generate key, a new dataset will appear in your GA4 resource settings and you will see the Public key.

Copy and paste the Public key into the OWOX BI. And then click the ‘Save’ button to apply your changes and close the dialog.

You will see a green marker with the phrase ‘Public key is set’. You are all set now.

In the OWOX BI interface, activate this pipeline by clicking on the ‘Activate’ button.

The pipeline will change status from ‘Draft’ to ‘Active’.

You are done. And now you can go to Google Analytics 4 and in the row for an existing data source, click the ‘Import now’ button.

It's not necessary, but it allows you to get reports in Google Analytics 4 without waiting for auto data import.

In GA4 you will see Import History with Statuses and Match rate:

P.S. In your Google Analytics 4 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 4.

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.

Start a Free Trial and get your Microsoft / Bing Ads cost data loaded into Google Analytics 4 in just a matter of minutes so you can stay on top of your advertising performance.