Setting Up {Param1} For Keyword-Level URL Tracking

Important note: This article only applies if you are not currently using Microsoft Advertising's Destination URL field at the keyword level. 

By default, Microsoft Advertising serves creative URLs on the Microsoft Advertising Search Engine Results Page. Therefore if you wish to have the keyword URLs serve instead (switching from creative-level tracking to keyword-level tracking), you will need to:

  • Set creative destination URLs to {param1} in order to tell AdCenter Microsoft Advertising to call upon the keyword level URL in the keyword {param1} field. 
  • Make sure all Microsoft Advertising keyword URLs have a URL with tracking parameters.
  • Make sure Microsoft Advertising keyword destination URLs are blank in Microsoft Advertising. In Marin, the destination URL field will contain URLs, which sync to the {param1} field in Microsoft Advertising.

Without the use of {param1} on creative URLs, Microsoft Advertising will only find and serve the creative URL while ignoring the keyword URL. This can cause issues such as:

  • Loading Unattributed revenue, where revenue is only attributed to creatives and is missing for keywords. This can happen if creative URLs are missing specific tracking parameters ({keyword} and {matchtype}) that would tell the system which keyword to assign the revenue

No revenue coming through at all. This can occur if you have tracking on your Microsoft Advertising keyword URLs, but have not updated the Microsoft Advertising creative URLs to: {param1}. Instead there is a regular URL on Microsoft Advertising creatives that do not contain tracking. Since Microsoft Advertising will default to serving the Microsoft Advertising creative URL, this URL with no tracking will get served, and therefore no revenue will be recorded from paid search.

How To Set Up Keyword URL Tracking

There are three methods to setting Microsoft Advertising creatives to {param1}Single EditMulti Edit and Bulk Edit.

How To Identify And Set Microsoft Advertising Creatives To {Param1}

  • Single Edit: Clicking into the creatives to go to the settings page and manually setting Destination URL to {param1}
  • Multi Edit: Filter to show only Microsoft Advertising creatives, select all creatives you want to edit and click the Edit button ('pencil' icon) above the grid. Select the Creative Edit option from the drop-down menu and set the Dest. URLbox to {param1} and click save.
    Note that having the "super-select" option enabled will result in the Creative Edit option to not show. A workaround is to increase the amount of rows shown, super-select all creatives then deselect a single creative.
  • Bulk Edit: Download a Microsoft Advertising creative report with Account, Campaign, Group and Destination URL columns. Filter on Destination URL for Doesn't contain {param1} and create the report. Once opened in Excel, set all URL's to {param1} and upload the report back to the platform.
    • When you edit/add Microsoft Advertising creatives through bulk upload sheets in the platform, the supported method of setting the Destination URL to {param1} is to upload {param1} into the Destination URL column.

If using redirects, the Destination URL column will still need to be used to upload {param1} for creatives and not the normal Click Through URL column.

If any of the variations below is inserted into the creative Destination URL, the platform will assume the user was attempting to set the creative destination URL to {param1}:

Value Issue
{param 1} extra spaces will be ignored
param1 "{}" will be imputed if omitted
http://{param1}  http:// will be ignored
{PARAM1} case will be ignored
 

Additional Information

  • Using a capital "P" for the parameter name, as in {Param1}, will cause an issue at the moment. Changing it to {param1} should resolve the issue for now.

Written by Marketing @ Marin Software

Last published at: June 27th, 2023