This description of methodology (DOM) is a summary of Bing Ads click-measurement processes, including general descriptions of the following elements:
The Media Rating Council (MRC) accreditation certifies Bing Ads’ click measurement systems adheres to the industry standards for counting ad clicks and the processes supporting this technology are accurate. You can view the Bing Ads’ MRC accreditation letter here.
Below is a summary of the click measurement processes and methods Bing Ads employs to measure and count clicks. For additional information, please visit the IAB/MRC click measurement guidelines.
Click-counting methodologies discussed in this article apply to the Bing Ads platform. The methodologies apply to the following types of clicks:
Invalid clicks: Clicks that fail to meet the minimum requirements outlined in the IAB Click Measurement Guidelines. Invalid clicks are a subset of low-quality clicks.
Defective clicks: Clicks that have technical problems or defects that prevent them from being billable, but otherwise might reflect actual human activity. All defective clicks are non-billable. Test clicks: Clicks that are generated due to test activity
All assessments of traffic are probabilistic in nature and are based on predictive algorithms. Such categorizations and assessments are the best Bing Ads estimates of traffic quality.
To prevent the click-filtration process from becoming compromised or reverse-engineered, Bing Ads discloses details of specific filtration procedures — except those in the Click Measurement Guidelines — only to auditors as part of the audit process. Back to top
Bing Ads bases its click-measurement methodology on the terms and descriptions described in this section.
Click losses during the click referral cycle The IAB’s Click Measurement Guidelines point out that, even by using the redirection counting method, differences will remain between measurements taken at the destination site because of various issues, such as latency, user aborts, 404 errors, and so on. In general, the number of Measured Clicks should always be equal to or greater than the number of Received Clicks. Advertisers should consider this known difference when determining whether they have an unusual amount of click loss. For example, if the advertiser's landing page is down, Bing Ads might record billable clicks even if the advertiser’s web server is not receiving them.
Pass-through tracking The click link in Bing Ads is encrypted and served immediately after the ad request, a sequence that reduces the likelihood that a malicious publisher or an infected browser might alter the redirection behavior of the ad click link.
Additional elements of measurement methodology
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To identify and filter (exclude) invalid click activity — including, but not limited to, non-human click activity and suspected click fraud — Microsoft employs techniques based on identifiers, activity and patterns found in web log data. However, because user identification and intent cannot always be known or discerned by publishers, advertisers or their respective agents, it is unlikely that all invalid click activity can be identified and excluded from the reported results. Bing Ads engineering will apply updates to the filtration methods below on an as needed basis. Multiple-click-per-impression Bing Ads uses the “multiple-click-per-impression method” in which a click is discarded when the time between the click and the previous click on an ad impression or search-result content is less than the repeat-click-refractory period specified by Microsoft. This rule is meant to correct for navigational mistakes such as unintentional double-clicking on an impression. User frequency caps Bing Ads limits the number of click events that can be billed per search user for a given period of time. If a user is found to exceed the limits, all activity from the user within the period of time is considered invalid. The definition of a search user is proprietary and varies by context, and the frequency caps employed are also proprietary and not disclosed. Impression staleness A click is considered invalid if the time between the ad impression (or search result) and the click is more than the impression-staleness window. For example if a user clicks an ad outside the impression-staleness window, Bing Ads considers the click “out of context” and invalid.
Impression-click refractory period The click will be filtered as invalid if the time between the ad impression (or search result) and the click is less than a minimum amount called the impression-click refractory window.
Repeat-click refractory period Rapid repeat-clicks can also signify robotic or non-commercial intent behavior. For a second click to be considered billable, a refractory period — that is, a minimum delay between repeated ad clicks mdash; must be met.
Activity-based Bing Ads uses machine learning systems to predict the quality of traffic and determine commercial intent. Bing Ads invalidates traffic that fails to meet a minimum level of quality as assessed through these techniques.
Served ad location Bing Ads might choose to not bill for a click that originates from a source other than the source that requested the ad.
Protocol validation Each click request must have an appropriate type — GET or POST, for example — and response code — 300-series, for example.
Self-announced prefetch activity Mozilla-based prefetchers should set an X-MOZ HTTP header to a value of "prefetch." To encourage counting clicks only upon direct user request for the ad and the required ad interaction, Bing Ads blocks prefetch ad requests by using a 403 denied return code. IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Robots List The IAB/ABCe International Spiders & Robots List is used to identify and remove known bots.
IAB/ABCe International Known Browsers List The IAB/ABCe International Known Browsers List (included in the Spiders & Robots List) is used to identify browsers that conform to known browser types. Browsers that are not on this list are filtered.
Internal Bing Ads filter lists Bing Ads maintains various internal house filter lists, including:
External filter lists Bing Ads also uses many external filter lists collected by the Blacklist Capture System. Defect and data integrity checks Bing Ads analyzes click and impression records to determine whether they are properly formed. Any records found to be defective are not billed. Note that defective records are not ordinarily reported in customer-facing reports. As a result, more clicks might be observed from an advertiser landing page than are reported by Bing Ads. Here are two examples of defect and data integrity checks:
Test traffic Test traffic is any traffic that uses FORM=MONITR, originates from a Microsoft or Yahoo internal IP address, or is a recognized benign crawler or scraper. Test traffic is not billed.
Microsoft crawlers Bing Ads uses a variety of bots, such as msnptc for page-ad analysis. These bots navigate directly to the advertiser landing page, bypassing the paid links, and do not affect click counts. The Microsoft search engine index bingbot is an exception to this rule. It navigates through paid links to reach the advertiser page. This bot is critical for ensuring that the advertiser page appears in organic listings as well as paid listings. Activity from this bot is classified as test traffic and is not billed.
Robot instruction files Bing Ads maintains robots.txt files on critical servers to discourage robotic activity from affecting click counts. However, because internet bots might not comply with the robots.txt file, they might still reach the advertiser's webpage.
Geotargeting methodology IP address lookups are used to determine the geographical location of search users. Because of limitations in geographical lookups, geotargeted ads might be served outside the requested geographical area. Also, there might be opportunities to serve the ad within the location, but it is not because of an error in the lookup. For example, the IP might be a proxy located somewhere other than the location of the search user.
Prohibition of bot activity The use of any unauthorized automated process to access Bing Ads is prohibited. Unauthorized bots that ignore this prohibition and robots.txt protocols might click paid links. Bing Ads makes every effort to filter out this traffic when it occurs.
Sophisticated invalid traffic Bing Ads has implemented Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) detection procedures inline with those defined by the MRC SIVT filtration requirements. Sophisticated Invalid Traffic consists of more difficult to detect situations that require advanced analytics, multi-point corroboration/coordination, significant human intervention, etc., to analyze and identify. Bing Ads SIVT filtration methods are based on activity-based rules, machine learning, and the results of human investigations.
Nature and scope of process and transaction auditing exercised On a periodic basis, internal and external auditors perform procedures to get comfort over the transactions and processes employed in invalid traffic detection.
Bing Ads is currently partnered with Yahoo! making search ads eligible to be served on both Yahoo and Microsoft owned networks. This partnership also allows the serving of ads to Microsoft and Yahoo syndicated partners and publishers.
Partner qualification controls Material business partners are expected to have internal controls to detect and correct invalid traffic per the MRC General Invalid Traffic guidelines.
Click quality reports for Bing Ads advertisers The account performance and campaign performance reports available on the Reports tab of Bing Ads can be enhanced to view click quality information. For more information, see the topic in Bing Ads Help. Several columns related to click quality may be added to this report:
Data that is not reported Click quality reports do not show defective or test click traffic, because such traffic is free of commercial intent and is not potentially billable.
Click-through rates greater than 100% Bing Ads reports click traffic in one-hour blocks, so that advertisers can observe patterns of behavior and more effectively target campaigns to particular hours of the day. This click-reporting technique occasionally results in click-through rates of greater than 100%. For example, an impression might occur during “hour 1,” and its corresponding click might occur during “hour 2.” When this happens, the “hour 1” report will contain 1 impression and 0 clicks, and the “hour 2” report will contain 1 click and 0 impressions.
Post-report billing adjustments Bing Ads makes every effort to eliminate and not bill for low-quality clicks within the hour, so that reports can be posted with all low-quality clicks removed. However, Bing Ads occasionally does not detect low-quality clicks until after the hour's data has been processed.
In these situations, it is no longer possible to go back and ignore the invalid clicks, as it was when the hour’s data was being processed. Instead, Bing Ads issues a billing adjustment in which it credits the charges for clicks that were found to be invalid. These credits are displayed on the billing report as adjustments.
ClickIDs and third-party or in-house reporting for advertisers Third-party landing page scripts and other in-house web server logs can be used to count clicks. However, by using Bing Ads ClickIDs you can more accurately count the measured clicks by differentiating them from repeated user page views. Note that not all web analytics programs support ClickIDs. How ClickIDs work A. The advertiser adds {msclkid} to the destination URLs for your ad.
B. Bing Ads creates, logs, and passes on the ClickID. When a search user clicks your ad, the user is sent to the Bing Ads redirection server. The redirection server then creates a ClickID. The redirection server looks for the {msclkid} parameter in the advertiser’s destination URL (for example, www.contoso.com/?msclkid={msclkid}). If the parameter is present, {msclkid} is replaced with the internally generated ClickID. The redirection server logs the ClickID to the Bing Ads click log, and then sends the user to the destination page with the appended ClickID. C. The advertiser’s web server log displays the ClickID. The advertiser’s web server log receives the request and then logs it along with the embedded ClickID. A typical entry might look like the following example: 131.107.0.73 - - [07/Aug/2008:04:10:38 -0400] "GET /?msclkid=cdd4afcccb1c9a4cad9544dd7e5006d5 HTTP/1.0" 200 4674 "http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=data+mining+case+studies&form=QBRE" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.2; MS-RTC LM 8)" D. The advertiser counts the unique ClickIDs. To calculate traffic referred from Bing Ads, count only the unique ClickIDs. For example, the web server log might display the following ClickIDs:
Microsoft Advertising pubCenter reports There are no click quality fields for publishers in pubCenter reports. Microsoft Advertising pubCenter reports do not include low-quality click counts, but they do include low-quality impressions. Please be aware of this difference when reviewing pubCenter reports.
How to monitor your account for suspicious activity Best practices for campaign monitoring include the following: