Consent Management in Microsoft (Bing)

Microsoft (Bing) is a powerful search engine that helps businesses reach a broader audience and track user interactions through Universal Event Tracking (UET). And recently, Bing has required users to obtain consent from their website visitors for tracking and collecting data. This is in line with various privacy regulations, such as the GDPR in the European Union.

We have already discussed the Universal Event Tracking (UET) Consent Mode for Microsoft (Bing) in our news post. This falls under the broader topic of Microsoft Ads server-side tracking, which covers how UET data can be sent and managed more reliably outside the browser. So here we would like to focus on practical tips and provide you an example of how to implement consent mode for tracking Bing Ads conversions.

Microsoft's consent requirements differ from the settings of Google Consent Mode V2, which you might already be familiar with if you had to set up GA4 on Shopify or another store platform under strict privacy rules. It's also not directly related to GTM's consent overview. Instead, it's an internal datapoint that Microsoft wants to receive along with conversion signals.

See example below, tag is configured to only fire when ad_storage is granted and this rule will work, however Microsoft as destination will not know the consent states involved:

Naturally, Microsoft would update their GTM template to accept consent data or make it compatible with GTM's consent overview. While we wait for that to happen, we have two options.

In this case you just need to follow the native documentation and add consent state pushes to your code as per example from the native doc:

If you are using Google's Сonsent Mode V2, the easiest way to pull a consent state would be using a variable such as GTM Consent State or CMP-specific one such as from Cookiebot. 

To make things easier our friend and partner Markus Baersch has released a handy Microsoft UET Consent Mode Tag to effortlessly push consent state to Microsoft UET. Those of you who ever used Simo’s Consent Mode will find it very familiar.

Functionality boils down to two commands: default and update and selecting a consent state value (either granted/denied or dynamic from a variable).

The Tag provides additional functionality:

• Set Clarity cookie consent - if you check, Clarity will use cookies if ad_storage status is set to "granted," or it will erase cookies otherwise.

• Push event to dataLayer when done - check to receive a dataLayer event when the consent command is sent to UET. The event name will be "uet_consent_default" or "uet_consent_update." The key "uet_consent_settings" will contain the UET settings that were set with that command.

For advertisers in Europe, it's crucial to review Microsoft's guidelines and update tracking methods to meet new consent requirements. In this article, we explained Microsoft's consent mode for Bing Ads conversions and how to add consent states using custom HTML tags or Markus Baersch’s UET template tool.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please leave a comment below or submit a ticket through our HelpDesk.