A preview of the next version of the Bing Ads API (v10) which arrives this summer

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At Bing Ads we are hard at work to improve our developer experience and we are excited to announce the roadmap for the next version of the Bing Ads APIs. Over the past few months developers like you have provided us valuable feedback and we want to take this opportunity to announce our V10 API plans ahead of time so you can start planning.

We’ll be releasing Bing Ads API v10 before the end of summer this year. Here’s a high level overview of what you can expect from this release.

 

Support for Upgraded URLs

We have been getting a lot of questions and concerns from our advertisers and customers about the support for Upgraded URLs in Bing Ads and how they will be able to manage URLs between AdWords and Bing Ads. To provide our advertisers more control and greater parity with AdWords, we will add the upgraded URLs at the following entity scopes in Bing Ads API V10.

 

We will provide our advertisers the choice to switch to upgraded URLs through API, Bing Ads web UI and our Bing Ads Editor client when this feature is generally available in summer 2015. At this time this will be an optional change for advertisers and this timeline aligns within a few weeks after AdWords removes support for Destination URL this summer. We will provide more detailed scope of the API changes in a follow up blog post.

 

Support for partial success in AdGroup and Campaign operations

Developers have told us that managing errors in the response for some entities like AdGroup and Campaign have been particularly challenging as we fail the entire operation when there is an issue with the transaction. In V10, we will be including support for partial success to our AdGroup and Campaign object’s service operations similar to what we already have for Ad and Keyword objects. This change will allow the caller to handle the response and errors in a consistent way in their code.

With this change in place, all write operations that involves an array of AdGroups and Campaigns will return a BatchErrors (instead of APIFault error) object in the response, which will contain a list of AdGroups or Campaigns that resulted in success and/or error during the write operations.

 

Updates to Reporting API

We will be including the following changes to our Reporting APIs.

  1. DeviceType and DeviceOS columns will be available in Goals, Traffic sources, Segments and Tactics and Channels reports. Having enabled unified device targeting in our platform recently, we believe providing the ability to pivot the performance data by these two dimensions will provide useful insights to our advertisers to make the necessary campaign optimizations based on Devices types and Devices OS.
  2. Along the same note, we will be introducing Device Type and Network dimensions in our SOV reports. This device and network level breakdown in the SOV would help our advertisers diagnose keyword performance, identify missing opportunities by device and network and make the necessary optimizations effectively.

 

Ad Intelligence and Optimizer services will be merged into a single service

In V10 we will be unifying the Optimizer service with Ad Intelligence service and nearly all current Optimizer service operations will be available through a single Ad Intelligence service endpoint.

Additionally, we will be making the following changes to our Ad Intelligence service

  1. We will be adding Network Type to our Keyword Research operations. This will be added as a new dimension so our customers can get historical keyword data for different networks. Ex., O&O vs. Syndicated.
  2. We are adding Bid Landscape to BidOpportunity and KeywordOpportunity data objects. This will allow you to accomplish your task in a single API call allowing customers to quickly identify the bid required for different performance goals.
  3. We will be removing the GetBudgetLandscape service operation and instead BudgetLandscape will be added to our BudgetOpportunity data object to simplify and reduce the API calls you need to make to get this data.

 

Updates to our Client libraries

Over the past few months we have released client libraries in C#, Java and Python languages for our developers and needless to say we will be updating all our client libraries to include support for these new features including App Ad Extensions.

We will also be including workflow support (similar to Bulk API) for our Reporting APIs to simplify the coding effort required to request, poll, download and parse the reports.

 

Other general housekeeping for our API

Aside from the changes mentioned above we will do the necessary housekeeping to keep our V10 API clean by removing all deprecated APIs. Developers using these deprecated APIs must move to the corresponding new APIs in V10. For instance SetNegativeKeywordsToAdGroups and SetNegativeKeywordToCampaigns will not be available in V10 but instead you will be able use AddNegativeKeywordsToEntities to perform the same function with more control. We will provide more details on these changes in a follow up blog.

This is just the first of a series of V10 API announcements and we are really excited to share all the new features that will be coming to our developer platform. We will ensure that the interface contract changes and functionality for these new features are made available in sandbox early Q2 so you can test your implementation and give us feedback.

As always, we would love for developers to provide their feedback on our APIs. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them in the comments below.