Bing Ads (Cohort Sync)

Send Amplitude cohorts to Bing Ads to create customer match lists for more personalized campaigns. This integration enables you to upload and sync behavioral cohorts directly to the Microsoft Advertising Network for campaign targeting.

Considerations

• You need a Microsoft Advertising account.
• Bing Ads customer match lists only support email as an identifier. Identify an Amplitude user property that maps to a user's email address before you set up the integration.
• Provide email addresses as plain text or a hashed string (using the SHA-256 algorithm). Amplitude automatically hashes plain text email addresses using SHA-256 before sending them to Bing Ads.
• Bing Ads only ingests users that have an email identifier set. The sync excludes users without valid email addresses.
• Customer match lists created through this integration are available to all accounts under the selected customer. You can associate these lists with any campaigns and ad groups across all of the customer's accounts.
• The list needs at least 300 people on the Microsoft Advertising Network to be eligible to serve.
• Customer match lists can take up to 24 hours to populate with members after syncing from Amplitude.

Setup

Prerequisites

You need a Microsoft Advertising account. Before you can sync cohorts, you must create at least one customer match list audience in the Microsoft Advertising UI and accept the terms and conditions.

Amplitude setup

1. In Amplitude Data, click Catalog and select the Destinations tab.
2. In the Cohort section, click Bing Ads.
3. Log into your Microsoft Advertising account (through OAuth) to authenticate and grant Amplitude permission to manage your audiences.
4. After Amplitude redirects you to the dashboard, configure the email property mapping to specify which Amplitude user property contains the email address.
5. Save your work.

Send a cohort

1. In Amplitude, open the cohort you want to export. Click Sync, and choose Bing Ads.
2. Select the destination.
3. Select the customer account.
4. Select the sync cadence.
5. Save your work.

After you send your Amplitude cohort to Bing Ads, you can view it in the Tools > Audiences section of the Microsoft Advertising dashboard. Amplitude adds an [Amplitude] prefix to cohort names in this format: [Amplitude] {cohort_name}: {cohort_id}.

For example, a cohort named "High Value Users" with ID "abc123" appears as: [Amplitude] High Value Users: abc123.

Lists can take up to 24 hours to populate with users.

Common issues

User discrepancies between Amplitude and Bing Ads

The sync may exclude some users if they don't meet certain requirements:

• Unresolved mapping: Users without an email property set in Amplitude
• Partner requirement unmet: Users with a malformed email (for example, iloveamplitude.com)

Example

To check whether Amplitude successfully transferred a user, review the CSV file from Amplitude. Amplitude identifies cases where users aren't included at third-party platforms by analyzing response codes. However, technical constraints may prevent fully detecting every instance of silent user exclusion. If you encounter issues or have questions, review this guide for more information about how you can investigate and diagnose cohort sync discrepancies.

Sync fails with "Bing Ads terms and conditions not accepted"

Before you can sync cohorts, you must create one customer match list audience and accept the terms and conditions in the Microsoft Advertising UI. The initial list doesn't need to contain customer data.

To accept the terms and conditions:

1. In Microsoft Advertising, navigate to Tools > Audiences.
2. Click Create.
3. Enter a name for the audience and select Customer match list.
4. Click Next.
5. Upload a CSV file with an Email header and at least one email address (you can use a placeholder like test@example.com).
6. Select I ACCEPT.
7. Click Next, then click Apply Changes.

After you complete these steps, you can view the created customer match list in the Audiences tab. You can now sync cohorts from Amplitude.

Cohort name doesn't update in Bing Ads

Amplitude doesn't update list names in Bing Ads after the initial sync. If you change the cohort name in Amplitude, the list name in Bing Ads remains unchanged. Keep the cohort name unchanged to avoid confusion.