• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 31, 2018

Getting serious about helping marketers follow the click, Bing on Wednesday introduced a way to follow ad clicks on Safari after Apple changed the way that marketers could track conversions on its browser.

Apple made the change to Intelligent Tracking Prevention in June 2017. The change only allowed marketers to recognize the conversion from third-party cookies if the consumer converts within 24 hours of last visiting the advertiser's website after clicking on an ad. After 24 hours, marketers can only use the cookies to support user log-ins to an app or page. After 30 days the cookies are purged.

Bing's move follows the one Google made. In September 2017, Google introduces a new analytics cookie for AdWords as a workaround that captures campaign conversion data.

Microsoft's solution to Apple's ITP restrictions uses Click ID and Universal Event Tracking. Enabling an auto-tag in the Microsoft Click ID by checking the box allows Bing Ads to automatically add a unique click ID to the landing page URL after a customer clicks on the ad. Marketers can setup the tag in the account level under URL options in the Shared Library, Nan Li, program manager at Microsoft Bing Ads, explains in a post. 

The Universal Event Tracking tag will set a cookie on the brand's websites to capture the Microsoft Click ID from the ad URL that brought the customer to the website. This allows Bing Ads to connect any conversions from a visitor back to the search ads that may have assisted in that conversion. It also will set a session ID cookie to help improve the accuracy of the conversion.