Microsoft Advertising API
The Bing Ads API v13 is public and free: SOAP services for campaigns, bulk, and reporting, documented on learn.microsoft.com with OAuth 2.0 via Entra ID. Signup is self-serve with a universal sandbox token. Rate limits are deliberately unpublished, and a 2025 reporting outage lasted weeks.
Frequently asked questions
Microsoft Advertising scores A on the API Report Card. The Bing Ads API v13 is public and free: SOAP services for campaigns, bulk, and reporting, documented on learn.microsoft.com with OAuth 2.0 via Entra ID. Signup is self-serve with a universal sandbox token. Rate limits are deliberately unpublished, and a 2025 reporting outage lasted weeks.
Microsoft Advertising has a workable official integration path. Most engineering teams can build against it directly. Open API: self-serve, documented, with SDKs
Microsoft Advertising (rebranded from Bing Ads in 2019) is Microsoft's digital advertising platform for buying paid placements across Microsoft-owned and partner inventory.
Vertical: Horizontal digital advertising, search, display/native, shopping, video/CTV, and retail media. Performance marketers and agencies set up campaigns in the Microsoft Advertising web UI or via the API: keywords, ad groups, audience lists, product feeds, creatives, bids, budgets, and conversion goals.
Microsoft Advertising reaches roughly 38% of US desktop search share via the Bing + Yahoo + AOL + DuckDuckGo + Ecosia syndication network, serves ads across MSN/Outlook/Edge/Xbox Casual Games to hundreds of millions of monthly users, and reaches LinkedIn's ~1B professional audience for targeting overlays.
Yes, for any advertiser running material spend on the platform, Microsoft Advertising is the system of record for the full paid-media operating dataset: campaign/ad group/keyword/ad/audience structure, bid strategies and budget pacing, every impression and click with cost, conversion events and revenue attribution (via UET and offline imports), Customer Match and remarketing audience lists with hashed PII, product feeds and Shopping inventory, geographic and demographic performance breakdowns, search query reports (the raw user queries that triggered ads), competitive auction insights, CTV viewership reporting, and the consolidated billing/invoice stream.
Launched in 2006 as Microsoft adCenter, rebranded to Bing Ads in 2012 after the Yahoo Search Alliance, and rebranded again to Microsoft Advertising in 2019 to reflect expansion beyond Bing search.
Rate limits (CallRateExceeded / error 117) are deliberately undocumented and 'subject to change,' making it impossible to design integrations against a known SLA. Reporting API outage in early 2025 left ReportDownloadUrl null for weeks, with users posting workarounds on Microsoft Q&A. Full sourced list under Sources below.
Common alternatives include Google Ads, Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram), Amazon Ads, TikTok Ads, LinkedIn Ads, The Trade Desk. Graded alternatives appear under "More from the report card" below.
Grades measure one thing: can a customer's engineering team get their own data out programmatically? We check six things (whether a real API exists, how access is gated, data coverage, auth quality, docs and developer experience, and stability) and roll them into a letter grade. Grades get re-verified, and they only move on evidence.