With Analytics Canvas it is possible to connect directly to the Bing Ads API.

This gives you all the power of Analytics Canvas to create great analysis, and excel based dashboards from data from all your Bing Ads accounts and campaigns.

Combined with the newly announced Google Analytics Cost Upload capability announced by Google, it is now possible to directly link your Bing Ads accounts to your Google Analytics accounts using Analytics Canvas.

Connecting to Bing Ads- Step 1- Use a non-Windows live account

The Bing Ads API does not support windows live linked accounts, so if you are using a windows live account to log into Bing, you will have to create a new user account for use with Analytics Canvas. The best approach is to try with your existing login, if this does not connect, then create a new account.

This is simple to do using the Bing Ads web site, the key is to use the “Create” option not the “Invite” option. The invite option will result in the use of a Windows live ID, the create option will not. You can see here where this functionality is.

This will ask you to create a user account, and will then email a link and code to the email you provided. Once you click on this link and validate, the new user account will be immediately available.

Connecting to Bing Ads in Analytics Canvas

To create a new import from Bing Ads, and get your Yahoo/Bing ads network data onto a canvas, you create an import block just as you would any data source. Select the “Data sources” tab in the upper left, then click on “New Source”. You will see all the different data sources available. Select Bing Ads.

The date range for the query will be the master date range by default (which is in the upper left in Analytics Canvas) but by selecting the time tab you can set it individually for each query if needed as well.

You will then be given a login prompt, this is where you log in using your Bing Ads account. Again, if your regular login does not work, it may be that it is linked to a windows live ID, and therefore cannot be used with the API. If this is the case, simply create a new user account for use with Analytics Canvas.

Next, you will be at the Bing Ads query definition page, where you can select which dataset you want, and which columns you want to include in that dataset.

There are a number of different reports, you can run a preview to see what data is being returned.

Once you select the query you want, pressing OK will insert the Bing Ads import block onto the canvas, and you’ll have your data ready to go in Analytics Canvas.

Next step- what if you want to import this Yahoo/Bing Ads network data right into Google Analytics? Find out how with the new Google Analytics Cost Upload functionality.