Data Quality Update for Bing Ads Customers

While the Bing Ads team was busy releasing the many customer-requested features over the past few months, our metrics and your feedback are indicating a surge in data-related incidents, including interruptions to data served in the campaign management UI, Reports and API.

We are responding with the utmost urgency, and are committed to improving the quality and availability of your data. At this time, we have contained all known issues. However, we want to share how we’re also preparing for the future.  

First, we are continuing to focus on three key elements of our platform:

• Data Freshness— this is the time that passes between real life event happening (e.g. showing or clicking an ad) and the impression and click information showing in our web interface (UI).
• Availability— this is the time it takes for pages with data to load upon user request in the UI or API.
• Accuracy— measured by number of miscalculations or misreporting of performance data.

Second, to measure the success of our investment in these three areas, we are closely tracking two key metrics:

• Time to detect– this is the time it takes us to detect an issue is happening and start mitigating it, some of the recent issue have been discovered by our customers and for us that is an unacceptable situation we are working hard to fix.
• Overall number of incidents– we are digging into each one of the issues we encountered in the last 3 months and weeding out key prevention item as means to reduce overall issues and number of repeated issues.

Finally, we would like to highlight a few short and long-term plans we have to further address the quality and availability of your data:

• Increasing monitoring – we are working to increase monitoring surface areas for data availability and quality with a goal of minimizing the time it takes us to detect issues and ensure we find all issues before they have a chance to disrupt your business.
• Provide more granular and up-to-date data in the Bing ads developer support page– we are planning to further break out the reporting APIs section to separate calls, add the last time of update to the data, and reduce the time it takes us to provide status to our developers.
• We will further rationalize the different surface areas of our data with a goal of making data access simpler and more familiar to AdWords users.

We appreciate your candid feedback and are looking to further increase communication and velocity of updates. As we continue to work through these changes we are committed to sharing details of those changes with you.  

Our support team is available at all times to field further issues as they come up. In addition, please feel free to comment below, or contact the Bing Ads platform team directly by mailing myself (erez.barak@microsoft.com) or Weiqing (weiqingt@microsoft.com). Weiqing and I can help expedite and prioritize any urgent issues, as well as make sure we are covering all your data needs and concerns.

Thank you,

Erez Barak, Principal Group PM & Weiqing Tu, Principal Development Mgr

on behalf of the Bing Ads Team