How to Enable UTM Tags (URL Auto-Tagging) in Bing Ads

Enable UTM Tags in Bing Ads

As most of you know today Bing Ads finally added auto-tagging for their URLs so you no longer have to use a third party tool. This is great news for everyone! Follow the steps below to enable this so it automatically adds the UTM parameters on to the end of your URLs from now on.

Step 1

First login to Bing Ads and click into “Accounts & Billing.”

Bing Ads Accounts & Billing

Step 2

Click into the account in which you want to enable the URL auto-tagging.

bing ads company account

Step 3

Under details click “Edit.”

bing ads edit

Step 4

Click the checkbox next to “Add UTM tags to my ads’ destination URLS.” Then select if you want to keep your existing tags and add any that are missing. For my campaigns they are pretty basic so I chose to replace all existing tags. (Note: This doesn’t actually show up in the UI on the ends of your URLs, it only adds it onto the end when the ad is actually served.)

bing ads url auto tagging

This adds the following UTM tags onto the end of your URL:

  • utm_source
  • utm_medium
  • utm_term
  • utm_campaign

So my URL would then look like this: https://brianjackson.io/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term={Keyword}& utm_campaign={CampaignName}

The {values} will be dynamically populated from the Bing ad data.

Why are UTM Parameters Important?

If you don’t use the UTM parameters, analyzing your traffic in Google Analytics is almost impossible. Here is an example below. See how in the picture my Campaign traffic source for bing / ppc is showing (not set). That is because I didn’t have a UTM parameter setup correctly to add the campaign name. Same goes for keywords, etc… You can see on the google / cpc source it shows you the campaign name it came from. That is because AdWords automatically sets the UTM parameters, just like Bing now will. For reporting data, this is crucial to have, otherwise on the Google Analytics side your Bing view will pretty much be a blank slate.

google analytics campaign traffic

Are you as excited as we are that Bing Ads finally got around to adding this? As always feel free to leave your comments below.

author bio
Brian Jackson

I craft actionable content and develop performance-driven WordPress plugins. Connect on X, subscribe to my newsletter (once a month), or buy me coffee.

3 thoughts on “How to Enable UTM Tags (URL Auto-Tagging) in Bing Ads”

  1. Neat Brian! I’m learning more about Bing and advertising these days as I move away from Google a bit. Thanks dude :)

    Reply

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