trackers

What the Microsoft Advertising UET Tag Sends, Page Titles Included

Microsoft’s Universal Event Tracking tag, UET for short, is the conversion and remarketing tag for Microsoft Advertising, the ad network behind Bing search ads. It loads bat.js from bat.bing.com and sends its events to bat.bing.com/action/.

It gets less attention than the Meta Pixel, and it often sends more than people expect: its page load events usually carry the page address and the page title.

A Microsoft UET request decoded by PXTA: the tag ID, the event type pageLoad, the address of a debt consolidation page, the page title Debt consolidation loans, and the machine ID, with the page address and title highlighted.

The Fields That Matter

  • ti is the UET tag ID, and evt the event type, such as pageLoad or custom. ea is a custom event action.
  • p is the page address, r the referring page, and tl the page title.
  • mid, vid and sid are machine, visitor and session IDs.
  • em and ph carry a hashed email and phone number for enhanced conversions.

Where It Usually Goes Wrong

Page titles. A title can say more than an address. /loans/dc-2 means nothing to a reader, while “Debt consolidation loans” is plain. PXTA checks titles as well as addresses for health, money trouble, checkout and account words.

Search ads, search pages. Sites that buy search ads often have busy site search too, and the search page’s address goes out in p. In the Marlow Home Loans sample, UET sent a search for “bankruptcy” after the visitor rejected tracking.

Enhanced conversions. Like Google’s version, Microsoft’s enhanced conversions hash customer details on the conversion page. PXTA matches hashes against addresses it knows.

What PXTA Can’t See

Conversions uploaded to Microsoft Advertising from a site’s own systems, or sent server to server, never pass through the browser.