Microsoft Ads Integration

Microsoft Ads is the channel most affiliate teams under-invest in, and a lot of the time that's the only reason it's still cheap. The Bing audience tends to skew older and higher-intent, the CPCs are lower than the equivalent searches on Google, and the inventory now includes Yahoo, AOL, and DuckDuckGo, plus access to LinkedIn audience targeting via the Microsoft Audience Network. None of that is a secret, but most operations still treat Microsoft Ads as the channel they'll look at properly "later".

The Routy integration with Microsoft Ads makes it easier to give Microsoft the same attention you're already giving Google. Spend, clicks, and impressions pull into Routy on a continuous schedule, and your downstream conversions get sent back to Microsoft through its Conversions API, so the automated bidding has real revenue to optimise against.

After connecting, the following becomes available in your Routy reports:

• Spend broken down by campaign, ad group, and keyword, so Microsoft Ads gets the same level of scrutiny as your larger channels
• Clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and quality score data from the Microsoft Advertising API
• Server-side conversion uploads to Microsoft via its Conversions API, so automated bidding learns from real outcomes rather than just on-page events
• Conversion attribution that ties every click Routy tracks back to the Microsoft campaign, ad group, and keyword behind it, including for clicks that came through the Audience Network or LinkedIn targeting

Plus, because Microsoft sits next to your Google and other channels in the same dashboard, you can do the cross-channel comparison honestly: same conversion definition, same attribution rules, same numbers across both.

You connect your Microsoft Advertising account through Microsoft's standard OAuth flow. If you've got a Manager account (Microsoft's equivalent of Google's MCC), you can authorise that and pick which sub-accounts to pull from. Once connected, performance data pulls from the API on a regular schedule throughout the day, and conversion events get posted back through the Conversions API in near real time.

A few things worth knowing before you connect:

• Microsoft Ads supports importing campaigns directly from Google Ads, and many operations run heavily mirrored setups across the two platforms. The integration handles both as separate connections, so you'll get clean side-by-side reporting for what's effectively the same campaign structure across both surfaces.
• The Microsoft Conversions API has stricter user-data matching requirements than some other platforms — it relies on hashed email or other consented identifiers to match conversions to clicks. If your conversion events don't include any of those, attribution falls back to click ID matching only, which works but is less robust.
• Audience Network and LinkedIn audience targeting clicks come through the same API and report alongside search clicks. They're labelled separately in the data so you can split them out in your Routy reports if you want to evaluate them differently.

The case for taking Microsoft Ads seriously is the same case it's been for years: lower CPCs, higher intent, less crowded auctions, and a meaningful share of search behaviour that you simply can't reach on Google. The case for connecting Microsoft Ads to Routy is that most teams don't take Microsoft seriously enough to spend the time building bespoke reporting around it, which means it stays under-optimised, which means it underperforms its potential.

Once Microsoft Ads is in the same reporting view as the rest of your traffic, the work to optimise it stops feeling like a separate project. You spot the same patterns you'd spot on Google, you act on them with the same tools, and the Conversions API uploads give Microsoft's automated bidding the same quality of signal Google has been getting. The result is usually a channel that performs better than its previous CPM and CPC numbers suggest, simply because it's now getting the same management attention as everything else.