We’re always super excited to expand our list of data sources for our users by launching new connectors on our Business Intelligence platform. In our previous platform update, we released a connector for Microsoft Advertising. Here are the simple steps to connecting data in your SEM platform to create actionable, insightful reports for your marketing team.
A Quick Word About Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft’s SEM platform Bing Ads has been rebranded as Microsoft Advertising. With this one platform, you can manage and monitor your search and display campaigns.
But there’s more to its rebranding than just a new name and interface. According to Sudipto Ghosh:
“Microsoft Advertising, earlier called Bing Ads, is a powerful combination of Big Data, Automation, and AI at your fingertips. Though rebranded as a mere name change, the evolution spells an important chapter in the history of Advertising Technology and the role of Microsoft in making every ad more personalized and connected to customer’s choice.” – MarTechSeries
Microsoft Advertising is a smart addition to Google Ads
If you’re already investing in Google Ads’ search or display network, Microsoft Advertising could be a smart addition to your marketing strategy. The chart below depicts the market share of search queries by providers in the U.S. as of July 2019. As you can see, by July 2012, Microsoft’s share began to increase significantly as it outperformed Verizon websites. It reached 24% of the market by July 2019, making it the second most popular search network behind Google in the U.S.
With greater market share and an innovative approach to online ads, Microsoft gives you a great opportunity to reach a broader audience and improve your conversion rates.
Elevate your Marketing Reporting with Microsoft Advertising + ClicData
Microsoft Advertising’s built-in reporting feature lets you monitor your campaign spending and ad performance. It helps you run your campaigns more effectively, as you can raise your bids on successful keywords, add new keywords based on Microsoft’s recommendations, tweak your messaging, and more. But if you really want to dig deeper into the data that explains your ads’ performance, it will only reveal so much.
For example, how can you tell which campaign has brought you more customers? How much did those customers spend on your product or service? And ultimately, what’s the ROI? Good luck finding this information in your Microsoft Advertising reporting.
To fill that gap and elevate your campaign effectiveness, you need a Business Intelligence tool that lets you connect and blend data from numerous data sources—including Microsoft Advertising, Google Ads, your CRM, e-commerce and accounting systems, to name a few—to deliver the data you need to hone your campaigns. That’s exactly what ClicData’s BI platform does.
It’s Easy to Connect Microsoft Advertising to ClicData
Connecting is very simple. If you don’t have an account on ClicData, you can sign up for a free trial today.
Click on “Add New” in the Data Connection tab.
Select “Bing Ads” from among ClicData’s list of connectors and click “Authorize.” You will need to grant access to your account. ClicData will clone the data from your Microsoft Advertising account into your data warehouse and will automatically refresh the data according to your preferences.
That’s all it takes. Simple as that.
Once you have connected ClicData directly to your data source, you won’t have to tediously export everything in CSV files and prep your data in Excel. You can simply choose the data you want to import. Et voilà.
Choose your datasets
Now you can choose the datasets you want to import for your reporting. To decide, ask these questions:
- What am I trying to measure?
- What information do I need to make smart decisions?
- What are the top 10 performance indicators I need to focus on? What are the KPIs I want to monitor?
The answers will guide you to import the best data for your purposes and create custom datasets. Choose from Account Performance, Ad Group Performance, Ad Performance, Audience Performance, Campaign Budget, Campaign Performance, and Campaign/Ads by Age and Gender.
For example, if you want to focus on your ads, you can select “Ad Performance.”
Next, choose the frequency with which you want to refresh your data. Every day? Every hour? You can also choose to customize the frequency based on certain hours during the workweek. If you have a weekly meeting to review your marketing stats, for example, you can set up a refresh every week, just before your meeting, to rely on the latest data.
In the example above, data will be refreshed every Tuesday at 3:30 pm EST.
Your Marketing Data — in Your Own Data Warehouse
For the best insights about the impact of your Microsoft Advertising network campaigns on sales, your data must first be cleansed, blended, and combined. To accomplish this, simply create connections to all your data sources, as you did with Microsoft Advertising above, and import your data into your ClicData data warehouse.
As a marketer, you probably want to be able to see insights from data from quite a few of your applications. Here are several of the most popular connectors we provide. We currently have hundreds of connectors—and counting!
Google Analytics
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
Instagram for Business
YouTube
and many more… #HowLucky
In addition to being able to aggregate data from multiple sources, having all of your data in a single place provides better security, improves user access to the data, and avoids confusion over data versions.
Dig into your data with custom and interactive dashboards
If you were running an e-commerce website, for example, identifying the top sellers in your Microsoft Advertising campaigns for the past six months would allow you to calculate your ROI and would help you identify the products you need to re-launch for the next season. So your next step would be to import and merge the data you want from Microsoft Advertising and your e-commerce website, specifically:
- The number of clicks per ad and per day
- The number of orders per product per day
Then, you can join the datasets into one using ClicData’s Merge function.
On your dashboard, you can use column charting to display the data that compares the number of clicks and the number of orders. If you like, add a line to display the transformation rate.
That’s just one example of the information and insights you can get out of your dashboards with ClicData. The platform lets you create an unlimited number of dashboards so that you can report your stats to anyone in your company that you want to access them.
Here’s another example of what you can do with ClicData and Microsoft Advertising. A dashboard to monitor the performance of your campaigns could combine financial, transactional and advertisement metrics to calculate key marketing performance indicators, including Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Costs, and Marketing Campaign Return on Investment. Plugin your own data and get the metrics you need.
Learn how to build it in our webinar Marketing Analytics and Calculating ROI.
Want to see more? Here are other dashboard examples to track your website and blog performance, your email campaigns, or social media stats.
You can also create executive-level reporting with marketing KPIs. With a single dashboard, you can easily share what’s working and what’s not so that you can have the data you need to make smart, informed decisions to fix it.
Pro Tips to Build Good Dashboards
We recommend you limit your dashboards to 10 KPIs per dashboard to keep them clean and easy for everyone to understand. One of our Dashboard Ninjas shares more best practices and good dashboard examples in our Dashboard Examples & Best Practices webinar.
If you need any help setting up your account or have questions about data transformations, our team is here to help! Get started today with ClicData to elevate your marketing and business reporting.
Happy dashboarding!