Lately you may have noticed your inbox filling up with emails from Microsoft Advertising informing you about an update to their UET (Universal Event Tracking) tag. This update is needed because from the 17th July, Microsoft are going to start rolling out UET Insights, an upgrade to the Microsoft Ads UI (User Interface) that will provide additional data about website traffic.
While it does not look like this will offer any groundbreaking advances in ad analytics tech overall, it does represent a significant improvement in Microsoft’s ad analytics offering. It could be indicative of future improvements that may enable Microsoft to carve out a greater share of the ad analytics market.
What is the UET tag?
The Universal Event Tag (UET) is Microsoft’s tracking code snippet. It allows advertisers to track and measure user interactions and conversions on their websites. In this, it is like the tracking code snippets used for other ad platforms such as the Meta Pixel or Google Ads Tag.
By placing the UET tag on your website either as in-line code or through a tag management solution like GTM (Google Tag Manager), you can gather data about user activity and set up conversion measurement for Microsoft Ads. This data is valuable for analysing campaign performance, optimising targeting, and bidding strategies.
What updates are Microsoft making?
From mid-July, Microsoft are going to start rolling out an automatic upgrade to UETs which will enable a new feature in their ads UI called UET Insights. UET Insights will gather additional data about visits to your website, so that you can optimize your campaigns and website more effectively. In turn, this can lead to a better user experience on your site and improved ROI. Once your UET has updated, a range of new metrics will become available in the Insights tab in your UET Dashboard, including:
- Session count
- Popular pages
- Device breakdown
- Quick backs (aka bounce rate)
- Country breakdown
- Average time active
You should also be able to sort these metrics by Date, Device, Country, Page, and URL. Additionally, Microsoft claims there will not be any sampling involved in the data you see in the UI.
Why now?
Advertisers familiar with Google Analytics will doubtless recognise many of the metrics which will soon become available through UET Insights, and you may be wondering how this update to Microsoft’s UET will benefit you given the similar reporting available through GA. After all, why double up on all your website analytics reports?
Well, call me a cynic, but I expect that timing is the key factor here. I doubt it is a coincidence that Microsoft is rolling out UET Insights just as Google is forcing all Google Analytics users to upgrade to GA4. GA4 is a powerful tool and a big improvement on the previous version of GA (also known as Universal Analytics), but it is also more complicated to set up and use than the previous version.
Conversely, UET Insights looks like it will have a simple out-of-the-box setup, closer in scope to Universal Analytics than GA4. Even the UET tag upgrade is automatic. By introducing UET Insights now, Microsoft may be hoping that some users of Universal Analytics will find it less daunting to switch to UET Insights than upgrade to GA4.
Is UET Insights about to replace GA as the go-to free ad analytics tool? Probably not. For most advertisers, this will likely amount to some nice additional data to view in the Microsoft Ads UI. But this upgrade from Microsoft does demonstrate that they are at least interested in moving deeper into the analytics space and are actively developing their own suite of tools.
I don’t want UET Insights, is it possible to opt-out?
There are plenty of reasons why you might not want UET Insights: perhaps you already have all the analytics reports you need set up in GA4, or maybe you want to double check that the updates to the UET tag are covered by your website’s terms of use and cookie policy before you allow them to happen. Whatever the reason, Microsoft has provided a couple of ways you can opt-out.
The first way to opt-out is to complete the form which you can find on this Microsoft blog page about UET Insights.
The second method is to disable UET Insights after it has gone live, which you will be able to do by adjusting the UET tag’s settings in the Microsoft Ads UI.
Is there anything else I need to do?
Apart from waiting excitedly for UET Insights, there is nothing else you need to do. The update to your UET should happen automatically at some point on or after the 17th July 2023.
At equimedia, we can help you to set up your Microsoft UET (or indeed GA4) along with a full suite of events and conversions on your website. If you’d like to know more about how we can help, please get in touch.
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| Author | Ed Perry |
| Channel | Media |