Bingâs Latest Offering: Universal Event Tracking

Imagine, if you will, a football game without goals at either end. Players aimlessly passing a ball from one man to another: no purpose, no moments of glory, no measure of success. While it wouldn't matter one way or another to a footballphobe like myself, some people would probably care that you had no way to decide which team had won, or which players performed best.

Anyone who works in paid search knows how closely it can mirror the glamour and drama of premiership football, and this is no exception. Without conversion tracking it's extremely difficult to know which campaigns, ad groups and keywords are driving the most quality traffic to your site. And it's with that in mind that Bing have recently released their latest conversion tracking solution: Universal Event Tracking (UET).

But I'm Already Tracking Conversions

Yes, hopefully you are. This isn't Bing's first foray into conversion tracking. For a few years now Bing's conversion tracking could be found in Campaign Analytics, where advertisers could define and track goals specific to their business.

The main drawback of Campaign Analytics was that, similar to AdWords conversion tracking, it relied entirely on goals where a new URL is generated after a goal has been completed e.g. a payment confirmation page or thank you page. Unfortunately in real life things aren't always that simple; you might have a form which doesn't generate a new URL, or want to track an event like watching a video. This is where Universal Event Tracking comes in.

What Can It Do?

UET will be very familiar to anyone who's already set up goals using Google Analytics. It works by placing a single piece of code onto every page of a site, rather than just onto particular conversion pages. Also, you're given the ability to track four different types of goals:

So there's the traditional destination URL-based goals we all know and love as well as some more sophisticated ones, which will be a very welcome addition to many advertisers. Also, because the code is present on every page of the site, it can gather data and offer insights on engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time on site.

How Do I Set It Up?

Unlike Campaign Analytics, UET lives in an account's Shared Library. You simply select View Goals and Conversions:

And start creating your goals:

When you create your first goal, you'll generate a tag which can then be placed on every page of your site. From there you can immediately start creating new goals associated with that tag based on destination URL, duration, or pages per visit. For an event-based goal, you'll also need to place additional code onto the event you're tracking e.g. a button or video. Some additional coding will also be required for tracking dynamic sales values, more details of which can be found here.

Any new tags set up in Bing from now on must be created in UET, and Bing have warned that any tags created before July 2013 will no longer be supported after April 2015. So even without the huge array of exciting things you can do here that you couldn't in Campaign Analytics, you'd have no excuse not to make the move over to UET as soon as possible. Happy tracking!

To view the article as displayed on Periscopix's website, please click here.