Accessing Geographical Location Codes for Targeting

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Bing Ads uses geographical location codes to help you narrow down the market areas where you wish to have your ads displayed. Starting today, we are making changes to the way this data will be accessed going forward.

 

Manual access

The codes may be downloaded manually from the Developer Center site, by going to the Accounts page and signing in with your Bing Ads account:

Dev Center Account Page

 

Note: As a best practice, you should download the file instead of opening it directly through an application such as Microsoft Excel. If you view the locations data in a text editor, be sure to use UTF-8 encoding instead of ANSI, otherwise some characters will not be displayed accurately.

 

Programmatic access

You may programmatically access the codes via the new GetGeoLocationsFileUrl service operation. This operation provides you a temporary URL from which you may download the file and use it in your application. Access to the operation will be subject to authentication as with any other Bing Ads API service operation. For more information, see Geographical Location Codes.

Note: Starting February 1, 2017, the location codes will no longer be available via the previously provided static URLs (for example, “https://api.bingads.microsoft.com/Api/SystemCodes/v1/en/GeoLocations.csv"). All programmatic access will have to be via the new service operation described above.