If you are in the PPC space, sooner or later you will run campaigns in Microsoft Advertising (originally “Bing Ads”). And sooner or later, you will need to get the Microsoft Advertising data into Google Data Studio. In this article, I will show you how to do it.
The Process
To solve our problem, we’ll be using Supermetrics for Google Data Studio, specifically their “Ad Data and Google Analytics” connector. It’s a paid product BUT they offer a trial (14 days) so you don’t have to pay a dime when testing and playing and you are free to decide whether it’s worth it or not.
Clicks the button below:
Start the free trial:
You’ll be taken to Google Data Studio where you need to click this highlighted link so you can authenticate with Microsoft Advertising. Don’t get discouraged by this ugly looking page. It’s probably limited by Google and nothing fancier can be shown. After you click the link, a new tab will open.
When you click the link, you will land to a page where you need to authenticate with Microsoft. Just click the button and follow the instructions.
Cautious readers will notice that there are multiple ad networks available for authentication – if you need to pull blended data from more ad networks, refer to this article which explains the process in a bit more detail.
When you are done with the authentication, click the Done button at the bottom of the page.
If you did everything correctly, you’ll see this confirmation. Close the current tab and go back to the original tab.
You should now see a few configuration options for your Microsoft Advertising account – you can select the accounts for which you need to pull the data. You can also decide whether users should be allowed to change accounts when playing with the final report. This is something to consider. If you are an agency which shares the dashboard with a client who has edit rights for report, the client should not be allowed to change the account so he or she does not see other customers of yours 🙂
When you are done with configuration of Microsoft Advertising, you can also play with advanced settings at the bottom of the page. You can convert UTM values to something else (helpful if you are combining with GA data) and you can also opt-in for a template. This means that a nicely looking report will be automatically created for you while using your data. This is helpful for beginners. I will choose this option so I have something nice to show you later.
When you are done here, click the CONNECT button.
You will be taken to yet another configuration page. Unless you know what you are doing, don’t change anything here and just click the CREATE REPORT button.
A confirmation dialog will pop out. Click CREATE REPORT again.
A blank report will open as the data is being downloaded in the background. Just keep waiting for a minute or two.
The Result
Finally, your shiny new report created from a template will load:
Of course, you can edit the template report and add e.g. a new page where you can manually create a new table with campaign level data like this:
Conclusion
If you made it all the way here, you’ve probably realized that getting Microsoft Advertising data into Google Data Studio is not as difficult as it originally sounded.
The only “issue” is that you need Supermetrics for Google Data Studio which is a paid product. The product currently sells for $199/month. This may sound quite expensive but I have not mentioned one important thing. The “Ad Data + Google Analytics” connector allows you to connect to:
- Google Ads
- Microsoft Advertising
- Facebook Ads
- Twitter Ads
- LinkedIn Ads
- Pinterest Ads
- Google Analytics
So for $199, you can access all the mainstream ad networks and you are actually able to create blended reports including all these sources as described in this article.
All of the sudden, $199 does not sound that bad 🙂