Business Rules for "PhoneNumber" Element of the MobileAd Data Object

Question

What are the current business rules for the PhoneNumber element of the MobileAd Data object. 

The API documentation states, "The phone number must belong to a business in the same market as the campaign."

It also lists market-specific phone number formats.

What is meant by "same market as the campaigns"?  Campaigns, as far as I remember, never had a "Market" element and the AdGroup "PublisherCountries" element was deprecated last year.

Answer 1

Hi Steve,

There are editorial validations based on targeting data that replaced PublisherCountries - see msdn.microsoft.com/.../adcenter-campaign-management-adgroup.aspx

To target your ads by location, use location targeting (see Target Locations); otherwise, your ads are displayed to users worldwide.

and

msdn.microsoft.com/.../adcenter-campaign-management-target-locations.aspx

Answer 2

My question is not about targeting, per se.

It is about the validation that Bing Ads applies to the requests to set or update the PhoneNumber element of the MobileAd data object.

I know that the maximum number of charcters is 20. 

I have also found by trial and error that the follow strings are accepted...

[phone]
[phone]
[phone]
[phone]
123 456 7891 1234 5
123456 7891 1234 5
1234567891 1234 5
1234567891 12345
123456789112345
123456789123456
[phone]
123 456 789123456
123 456789123456
01 32 55 22 45
01 32 55 22 45 43 3
[phone]
[phone]

...and that the following strings are rejected...

[phone]
123456789 123456789
123456789 123456789
123 456789 123456789
123 4567891 12345678
123 4567891 1234 567
123 456 7891 1234 56
1234567891234567
1 234567891234567
+1 234567891234567
+1 234 567891234567
+1 234 567 891234567
+1 123456789123456
0 123456789112345
012345678911234
01 32 55 22 45 43 34

I'd like to know what front-end validation to applied so that my application does not attempt to to submit API request with PhoneNumbers values that will be rejected.   If validation rules (not ad serving rules) vary by targeted country, how they vary would also be important to know.All examples above have 20 or fewer characters.

Answer 3

Recommended best practice is to have the phone number match the country you are targeting in campaign. For example, if you are targeting US in campaign, you want to add a US based phone number in mobile Ad. We run validations like this is not a 1-900 number and equivalent of that in each country.

Answer 4

Steve in Montreal,

  I'm not sure if it is a copy and paste error OR HTML formatting issue but both lists of phone numbers look identical.

Answer 5

@ Dare Obasanjo

Thanks for pointing out the cut and past error.  The two lists are now distinct.

Answer 6

Another un-documented behavior I've observed is that if the MobilAds' PhoneNumber  is set to...

2063252355

...when you later request the number with GetAdsByIds, the response is...

[phone]

It doesn't matter if you're targeting the UK, Canada or the USA; the PhoneNumber is always returned with North American formatting.

Rather than spending days trying to reverse engineer the API behavior, I'd prefer that Bing Ads simply update the API documentation to describe the current behavior.

Answer 7

One last post about PhoneNumber (I promise!)

UK Phone Numbers

I found these guidelins for UK phone formats...

http://www.area-codes.org.uk/formatting.php

I tried every number format identified in this article.  The good news is the Bing Ads accepted all of them.  Interestingly, if didn't matter what the location targeting was: UK only, USA only, UK&US, no location targeting all produced the same results.

Oddly, Bing Ads applied NorthAmerican formatting in some cases, even though the targeting was "Country/region: United Kingdom.:"  

Item	Sumbitted     PhoneNumber	Returned PhoneNumber
UK.01	023 4532 4365	same
UK.02	0131 453 5776	same
UK.03	0115 543 4436	same
UK.04	01634 766543	same
UK.05	01654 43287	[phone]
UK.06	015348 38493	same
UK.07	015348 3849	[phone]
UK.08	[phone]	same
UK.09	07443 443654	same
UK.10	0800 1111	same
UK.11	0845 4647	same
UK.12	0800 123 4567	same
UK.13	08001 234567	same
UK.14	[phone]	same

NorthAm Phone Numbers

Here are the results for variations of different NorthAmerican-style numbers. Again, the location targeting appeared to have no impact on the results, in spite of information posted elsewhere in this thread.

Sometimes the service stripped out [non-standard?] formatting and applied conventional formatting.

It also seems that a PhoneNumber my include an extension, but only if the extension is exactly three digits (two-digit and four-digit extensions fail)

Item	Sumbitted PhoneNumber	Accepted by Bing Ads?	Returned PhoneNumber
NA.01	2063252355	yes	[phone]
NA.02	20 63252355	yes	[phone]
NA.03	20 63 25 23 55	yes	[phone]
NA.04	12063252355	yes	same
NA.05	8003329332	yes	[phone]
NA.06	800.332.9332	yes	[phone]
NA.07	1.800.332.9332	yes	same
NA.08	(80)03329332	yes	[phone]
NA.09	8(003329)332	yes	[phone]
NA.10	8(00.3329.332	yes	[phone]
NA.11	8(00.33+29.332	yes	[phone]
NA.12	800.332.9332x334	yes	same
NA.13	800.332.9332, x334	yes	same
NA.14	800.332.9332 x-334	yes	same
NA.15	800.332.9332 x-33	no
NA.16	800.332.9332 x-3344	no
NA.17	8003329332, ext. 334	no
NA.18	8003329332-334	yes	same
NA.19	800.332.9332-334	yes	same
NA.20	800.332.9332 334	yes	same
NA.21	800.332.9332 3344	no

Any accurate insight Bing Ads could provide about the actual rules and behavior would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 8

Hi Steve

We validate a given phone number for all top markets of the language of the adgroup.

If adgroup language = English, we validate the phone number for US,CA,UK,IE

If adgroup language = French, we validate the phone number for FR,CA

If adgroup language = German, we validate the phone number for Germany, Austria, Switzerland

The recommended best practice is to have a phone number that matches the country of your targeting in campaign / adgroup. For example, if you are targeting a campaign to US, it is best to have US phone number in mobile Ads

In an ideal case, this object would also contain the country of phone number so that we can validate just for that country. That is in the backlog for a future release.

Hope this helps.

Thanks

Murali

Answer 9

Also, please note that when we validate a phone number against all these countries, only one of them would match and we would throw errors for other countries. That is the reason why you see so many errors. The errors will have country and error code, reason details

Thanks

Answer 10

Hi Steve,

Thank you for your patience. We have updated the MSDN documentation.

Please see the MSDN link for more information. msdn.microsoft.com/.../cc512741.aspx

Hope this helps! :-)