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Custom Audience Record - Bulk

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Defines a custom audience that can be downloaded and uploaded in a bulk file.

Note

Only update of the Audience (audience name) and Description fields are supported for upload. You can delete but cannot add a custom audience using the Bing Ads API. Having said that, you can add and delete custom audience associations and exclusions.

A custom audience is a type of remarketing list that is generated by using your own customer data to create richer user segments. You can use custom audiences in conjunction with your remarketing lists, usually through your data management provider (DMP). When your DMP connects to our custom audience feature, you can then import your custom audiences into Microsoft Advertising for search remarketing. You can use custom audiences separately from remarketing, with no UET required.

Tip

For an overview and more information about audiences, see the Audience APIs technical guide.

You can download all Custom Audience records in the account by including the DownloadEntity value of CustomAudiences in the DownloadCampaignsByAccountIds or DownloadCampaignsByCampaignIds service request. Additionally the download request must include the EntityData scope. For more details about the Bulk service including best practices, see Bulk Download and Upload.

The following Bulk CSV example would update the description of a custom audience. Note: For a custom audience the membership duration is not set in the Microsoft Advertising web application, and Microsoft Advertising defers to your custom audience provider settings.

Type,Status,Id,Parent Id,Client Id,Modified Time,Name,Description,Scope,Audience,Supported Campaign Types
Format Version,,,,,,6.0,,,,,
Custom Audience,Active,IdHere,ParentIdHere,ClientIdGoesHere,,,Updated Custom Audience Description,30,Account,Custom Audience,Search;DynamicSearchAds;Shopping;Audience

If you are using the Bing Ads SDKs for .NET, Java, or Python, you can save time using the BulkServiceManager to upload and download the BulkCustomAudience object, instead of calling the service operations directly and writing custom code to parse each field in the bulk file.

var uploadEntities = new List<BulkEntity>();

// Map properties in the Bulk file to the BulkCustomAudience
var bulkCustomAudience = new BulkCustomAudience
{
    // 'Client Id' column header in the Bulk file
    ClientId = "ClientIdGoesHere",

    // Map properties in the Bulk file to the 
    // CustomAudience object of the Campaign Management service.
    CustomAudience = new CustomAudience
    {
        // 'Audience Network Size' column header in the Bulk file
        AudienceNetworkSize = null,
        // 'Description' column header in the Bulk file
        Description = "Updated Custom Audience Description",
        // 'Id' column header in the Bulk file
        Id = customAudienceIdKey,
        // 'Audience' column header in the Bulk file
        Name = null,
        // 'Parent Id' column header in the Bulk file
        ParentId = accountIdKey,
        // 'Scope' column header in the Bulk file
        Scope = null,
        // 'Audience Search Size' column header in the Bulk file
        SearchSize = null,
        // 'Supported Campaign Types' column header in the Bulk file
        SupportedCampaignTypes = null,
    },
                
    // 'Status' column header in the Bulk file
    Status = Status.Active
};

uploadEntities.Add(bulkCustomAudience);

var entityUploadParameters = new EntityUploadParameters
{
    Entities = uploadEntities,
    ResponseMode = ResponseMode.ErrorsAndResults,
    ResultFileDirectory = FileDirectory,
    ResultFileName = DownloadFileName,
    OverwriteResultFile = true,
};

var uploadResultEntities = (await BulkServiceManager.UploadEntitiesAsync(entityUploadParameters)).ToList();

For a Custom Audience record, the following attribute fields are available in the Bulk File Schema.

Audience

The name of the custom audience.

The name can contain a maximum of 128 characters.

Add: Not supported
Update: Optional. If no value is set for the update, this setting is not changed.
Delete: Read-only

Audience Network Size

The total number of people who are active members of this audience in the Audience network. This gives you an idea of how many Audience network users you can target.

The audience needs to have at least 300 people before Microsoft Advertising will use it for optimizations.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Read-only

Audience Search Size

The total number of people who are active members of this audience in the Search network. This gives you an idea of how many search users you can target.

The audience needs to have at least 300 people before Microsoft Advertising will use it for optimizations.

This property will be empty for up to 24 hours while the audience is being built, for example if you have imported new custom audiences from DMP, it takes 24 hours to build the audience, and in the meantime this property will be empty.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Read-only

Client Id

Used to associate records in the bulk upload file with records in the results file. The value of this field is not used or stored by the server; it is simply copied from the uploaded record to the corresponding result record. It may be any valid string to up 100 in length.

Add: Not supported
Update: Optional
Delete: Read-only

Description

The description of the custom audience. Use a description to help you remember what audience you are targeting with this custom audience.

The description can contain a maximum of 1,024 characters.

Add: Not supported
Update: Optional. If no value is set for the update, this setting is not changed. If you set this field to the delete_value string, the prior setting is removed.
Delete: Read-only

Id

The system-generated identifier of the custom audience.

Add: Not supported
Update: Required
Delete: Read-only and Required

Membership Duration

The membership duration determines how far back in time Microsoft Advertising should look for actions that match your custom audience definition in order to add people to your list. For a custom audience the membership duration is not set in the Microsoft Advertising web application, and Microsoft Advertising defers to your custom audience provider settings.

When you request the custom audience via Bing Ads API, the returned membership duration will be null.

Add: Not supported
Update: Not supported
Delete: Read-only

Modified Time

The date and time that the entity was last updated. The value is in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Note

The date and time value reflects the date and time at the server, not the client. For information about the format of the date and time, see the dateTime entry in Primitive XML Data Types.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Read-only

Parent Id

The Microsoft Advertising identifier of the customer that contains the custom audience.

Add: Not supported
Update: Required
Delete: Read-only

Scope

Scope defines what accounts can use this custom audience. For a custom audience the only supported scope is Customer, and the custom audience can be associated with any campaigns and ad groups across all of the customer's accounts.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Read-only

Status

The custom audience status.

Possible values are Active or Deleted.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Required. The Status must be set to Deleted.

Supported Campaign Types

The semicolon delimited list of campaign types that support this custom audience.

Supported values are Audience, DynamicSearchAds, Search, and Shopping. New campaign types might be added in the future, so you should not take any dependency on a fixed set of values.

Add: Not supported
Update: Read-only
Delete: Read-only