How to load data from Bing Ads to Google BigQuery

Access your data on Bing Ads

The first step in loading your Bing Ads data to any kind of data warehouse solution is to access your data and start extracting it.

Bing Ads has a very rich API that is primarily offered for interacting with the platform and to create and run campaigns programmatically. A big part of the API is also a rich reporting system that helps you understand how the campaigns you run perform.

By default, Bing Ads exposes a large number of different reports, the current number of available reports based on the latest documentation is 35.

Reports can have different types of aggregation defined by you. The default is set to “Summary” which means that you will end up with a report for the whole time of your account. For analytic purposes, it is advised to set the aggregation to a daily basis. This is also the lowest time granularity that you can have on Bing Ads.

The bing Ads API is implemented using the SOAP protocol, this will add some complexity to your development as you will have to manage SOAP and XML responses.

Also, keep in mind that as in every other API, you will have to respect the API usage limits and make sure that you handle errors correctly.

Reports in Bing Ads are configured by selecting the following:

1. Columns, the columns that you want to be included in the report
2. Filters, you should provide custom filters that filter the report data
3. Scope, to reduce the data you get based on specific accounts.

Transform and prepare your Bing Ads data for Google BigQuery Replication

After you have accessed your data on Bing Ads, you will have to transform it based on two main factors,

1. The limitations of the database that the data will be loaded onto
2. The type of analysis that you plan to perform

Each system has specific limitations on the data types and data structures that it supports. If for example, you want to push data into Google BigQuery, then you can send nested data like JSON directly, but keep in mind that in the case of a SOAP API like Bing Ads, you get XML responses. Of course, when you are dealing with tabular data stores, like Microsoft SQL Server, this is not an option. Instead, you will have to flatten out your data, just as in the case of JSON, before loading it into the database.

Also, you have to choose the right data types. Again, depending on the system that you will send the data to and the data types that the API exposes to you, you will have to make the right choices. These choices are important because they can limit the expressivity of your queries and limit your analysts on what they can do directly out of the database.

With Bing Ads, you have two main additional sources of complexity. When it comes to data types you have to keep in mind that SOAP is using XML to describe the service and the data, so the data types that you have to map are coming from XML and might have automatically be transformed into the primitive data types of the language that you are using.

Also, you have to consider that the reports you’ll get from Bing Ads are like CSV files in terms of their structure and you need to somehow identify what and how to map to a table into your database.

Export data from Bing Ads to BigQuery

If you want to load Bing Ads data to Google BigQuery, you have to use one of the following supported data sources.

1. Google Cloud Storage
2. Sent data directly to BigQuery with a POST request
3. Google Cloud Datastore Backup
4. Streaming insert
5. App Engine log files
6. Cloud Storage logs

From the above list of sources, 5 and 6 are not applicable in our case.

For Google Cloud Storage, you first have to load your data into it, there are a few options on how to do this, for example, you can use the console directly as it is described here and do not forget to follow the best practices.

Another option is to post your data through the JSON API, as we see again APIs play an important role in both the extraction but also the loading of data into our data warehouse. In its simplest case, it’s just a matter of one HTTP POST request using a tool like CURL or Postman.

After you have loaded your data into Google Cloud Storage, you have to create a Load Job for BigQuery to actually load the data into it, this Job should point to the source data in Cloud Storage that have to be imported, this happens by providing source URIs that point to the appropriate objects.

The best way to load data from Bing Ads to BigQuery

So far we just scraped the surface of what can be done with Google BigQuery and how to ingest data into it. The way to proceed relies heavily on the data you want to load, from which service they are coming from, and the requirements of your use case.

Things can get even more complicated if you want to integrate data coming from different sources. A possible alternative, instead of writing, hosting, and maintaining a flexible data infrastructure, is to use a product like RudderStack that can handle this kind of problem automatically for you.

Easily use the Bing Ads connector from RudderStack, along with multiple sources or services like databases, CRM, email campaigns, analytics, and more. Quickly and safely ingest Bing Ads data into Google BigQuery and start generating insights from your data.