Customers experiencing faster downloads and uploads switching to v9 Bulk APIs

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Last fall, we launched a new version of our Bulk API service as part of v9. Since then we’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from customers who have adopted this API for large scale transactions.

Today we’re happy to share some of the positive experiences that developers have been reporting based on real usage of the Bulk APIs.

What is Bulk API ?

The latest version (v9) of Bulk API supports uploading and downloading campaign data using comma separated values (CSV) or tab separated values (TSV). Bulk APIs are designed to manage large sets of campaign data in substantially less time and offer significant performance gains over existing Campaign Management APIs. It allows you to asynchronously add or update multiple entities across your entire account all in one request. This is especially appealing for scenarios like updating all the bids across all your keywords which would historically require multiple API requests with the Campaign Management Service.

Performance Improvements

Bing Ads team analyzed all the Bulk API transactions executed over the last few months and examined the performance gains on the actual customer requests. This analysis excluded all the test and monitoring calls from to focus on the performance improvements as perceived by our customers and tool providers.

The key performance gains measured during the analysis are as follows:

Bulk Upload:

    • Uploads are 18 times faster than Campaign Management APIs
    • Average time to upload an account with 1 million entities is less than 30 minutes

Bulk Download:

    • Downloads are 2x faster compared to v8 bulk downloads
    • Downloading account using Bulk API is 20x faster than using Campaign Management APIs
    • Average time to download an account with 1 million entities is less than 5 minutes

The performance gains observed are substantial. Bulk APIs enabled customers to upload and download millions of campaign entities in hours compared to days using Campaign APIs.

Customer Testimonials

The performance improvements using Bulk API would be subjective to usage and scenarios specific to the customer. However, performance improvements noticed during the analysis align with the testimonials received from Bulk API customers. The following are few testimonials to share.

  “Able to make big update 10x faster than before and we are highly happy with the ability to make close-to real time bid updates”

“Spend has increased by 2x after using Bulk APIs”

“With switching to use the bulk service, we saw significant improvement in one of our most popular tools, job speed and allowed our hardware to handle more jobs concurrently”

“We noticed 5-10x performance lifting in the tool by using bulk service”

Who can use the Bulk API?

All Bing Ads API customers can use Bulk Service API, which is an efficient complement to our Campaign Management APIs. For certain scenarios, it is more efficient to use bulk request. Customers with high frequency operations such as bid updates, ad group or campaign target optimizations etc. will benefit by using the Bulk APIs.

How to implement the Bulk API?

The programming model of Bulk API is much simplified in v9. Bulk APIs customers can use the standard CSV or TSV formats to exchange data with Bing Ads platform. Once you have all your data to be add or updated, post your CSV file to the service and then poll for the status of your bulk operation. Our customers and partners, who leveraged the Bulk APIs, mentioned implementing both bulk download and upload API in just a few weeks.

Resources to assist with migration

MSDN has the detail Technical guide and API reference documentation to help customers to onboard to Bulk APIs. If you have any questions or need further assistance in migrating to Bulk APIs, you can always reach us at Bing Ads API Forums or Bing Ads Support.

 

Thanks

Ravi Modalavalasa

Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation