Connect Microsoft Advertising

Whence sends your sales to Microsoft Advertising from the server, through the UET Conversions API. You copy two values from your UET tag, paste them in Whence, and check the setup. Plan on about 5 minutes.

What Whence sends to Microsoft Advertising

With your visitor’s marketing consent only, from the server, to your UET tag:

• Checked by default: Purchase, sent with the event action “purchase” (or the one you set), value, currency and products.
• Unchecked by default: Product view (view_item), Add to cart (add_to_cart), Checkout started (begin_checkout) and Payment info (add_payment_info). Microsoft has no standard names: before you turn one on, create a conversion goal of type Event with that exact action. Page view is unchecked too, because your UET tag already sends page loads without Whence’s event ID.
• Matching details: hashed email, phone and visitor ID, Microsoft’s ad click (msclkid), IP address and browser.

Where to find your IDs in Microsoft Advertising

Set it up in Whence

3Step 3: Open Microsoft Advertising in Conversions

Open Marketing > Conversions and click Set up (1) on the Microsoft Advertising row.

Close

4Step 4: Paste your IDs and check the setup

1. Paste your UET tag ID (1).
2. Paste your Conversions API token (2).
3. Click Save and check (3).

Close

5Step 5: Set the event action and the events

Open More options:

• Event action (optional) (1): leave it empty to send “purchase”. Otherwise type the Event action of your purchase conversion goal (goal type: Event), exactly as written in Microsoft Advertising.
• The events to send (2): only Purchase is checked by default. Check another step only once a conversion goal of type Event with that exact action exists.

Close

In Shopify admin, turn on the Microsoft Advertising switch under Conversions sent to your ad platforms (click Show if it is not listed), fill in the same fields, click Save, then Check the setup.

Test the connection

Microsoft Advertising has no test mode: every sale sent is real. So Whence sends nothing when you check. It only checks your settings: “Settings look valid. Microsoft Advertising has no test mode, so nothing was sent: the token is checked with the first real event, and a wrong token then shows up on this destination as an error.” There is no Test mode option for this platform.

Avoid counting sales twice

If your UET tag already reports purchases from the browser with the same event action, each sale may be counted twice: that tag does not share Whence’s event ID. Either let Whence run the UET tag in the browser (Whence also runs the Microsoft Ads pixel in the browser under More options, see Browser pixel), use a separate conversion goal, or set a different Event action.

Common errors

• “UET tag ID doesn’t look right. Check the format.” It is a number of 4 to 12 digits.
• “Microsoft Advertising: …” after the first real sale: a missing, wrong or foreign token (Microsoft answers 401), or a field Microsoft refused, with its name. Copy the token again, click Fix, then Update the settings.
• “Microsoft Advertising received the event, without: …”: the sale counted, but Microsoft dropped an optional field it did not accept.
• “Microsoft Advertising refuses events older than 7 days.” Rare, since Whence sends within hours.