This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Microsoft Advertising and load it into Panoply. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)
What is Microsoft Advertising?
What is Panoply?
Panoply is a fully managed data warehouse service that can spin up an Amazon Redshift instance in just a few clicks. It uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to learn, model, and automate standard data management activities from source to analysis. It can import data with no schema, no modeling, and no configuration. With Panoply, you can use your favorite analysis, SQL, and visualization tools just as you would if you were creating a Redshift data warehouse on your own.
Getting data out of Microsoft Advertising
Microsoft makes Advertising data available through a Microsoft Advertising API, which offers data on things like ad insights, estimated bids, estimated positions, and many other kinds of data. Because it’s a SOAP API, scripts must call data objects by making SOAP request messages.
For example, to get data about bid opportunities, you could use the Microsoft Advertising API GetBidOpportunities service. The service’s syntax includes four header elements and three body elements, two of which are optional. Once you decided exactly what information you wanted, you could code a SOAP request that might look like this:
<s:Envelope xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<s:Header xmlns="Microsoft.Advertiser.AdInsight.Api.Service.V11">
<Action mustUnderstand="1">GetBidOpportunities</Action>
<ApplicationToken i:nil="false">ValueHere</ApplicationToken>
<AuthenticationToken i:nil="false">ValueHere</AuthenticationToken>
<CustomerAccountId i:nil="false">ValueHere</CustomerAccountId>
<CustomerId i:nil="false">ValueHere</CustomerId>
<DeveloperToken i:nil="false">ValueHere</DeveloperToken>
<Password i:nil="false">ValueHere</Password>
<UserName i:nil="false">ValueHere</UserName>
</s:Header>
<s:Body>
<GetBidOpportunitiesRequest xmlns="Microsoft.Advertiser.AdInsight.Api.Service.V11">
<AdGroupId i:nil="false">ValueHere</AdGroupId>
<CampaignId i:nil="false">ValueHere</CampaignId>
<OpportunityType>ValueHere</OpportunityType>
</GetBidOpportunitiesRequest>
</s:Body>
</s:Envelope>
Sample Microsoft Advertising data
The Microsoft Advertising API returns XML objects. In response to a bid opportunities request, for example, the service would provide a SOAP response that might look like this:
<s:Envelope xmlns:s="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/">
<s:Header xmlns="Microsoft.Advertiser.AdInsight.Api.Service.V11">
<TrackingId d3p1:nil="false" xmlns:d3p1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">ValueHere</TrackingId>
</s:Header>
<s:Body>
<GetBidOpportunitiesResponse xmlns="Microsoft.Advertiser.AdInsight.Api.Service.V11">
<Opportunities xmlns:e63="http://schemas.datacontract.org/2004/07/Microsoft.BingAds.Advertiser.AdInsight.Api.DataContract.V11.Entity" d4p1:nil="false" xmlns:d4p1="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<e63:BidOpportunity>
<e63:AdGroupId>ValueHere</e63:AdGroupId>
<e63:CampaignId>ValueHere</e63:CampaignId>
<e63:CurrentBid>ValueHere</e63:CurrentBid>
<e63:EstimatedIncreaseInClicks>ValueHere</e63:EstimatedIncreaseInClicks>
<e63:EstimatedIncreaseInCost>ValueHere</e63:EstimatedIncreaseInCost>
<e63:EstimatedIncreaseInImpressions>ValueHere</e63:EstimatedIncreaseInImpressions>
<e63:KeywordId>ValueHere</e63:KeywordId>
<e63:MatchType d4p1:nil="false">ValueHere</e63:MatchType>
<e63:SuggestedBid>ValueHere</e63:SuggestedBid>
</e63:BidOpportunity>
</Opportunities>
</GetBidOpportunitiesResponse>
</s:Body>
</s:Envelope>Preparing Microsoft Advertising data
If you don’t already have a data structure in which to store the data you retrieve, you’ll have to create a schema for your data tables. Then, for each value in the response, you’ll need to identify a predefined datatype (INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. The source API documentation should tell you what fields are provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.
Complicating things is the fact that the records retrieved from the source may not always be "flat" – some of the objects may actually be lists. This means you’ll likely have to create additional tables to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record.
Loading data into Panoply
Once you have identified all of the columns you want to insert, you can use the CREATE TABLE statement in Panoply's Redshift data warehouse to create a table to receive all of the data.
With a table built, it may seem like the easiest way to migrate your data (especially if there isn't much of it) is to build INSERT statements to add data to your Redshift table row by row. If you have any experience with SQL, this will be your gut reaction. But beware! Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, you would be better off loading the data into Amazon S3 and then using the COPY command to load it into Redshift.
Keeping Microsoft Advertising data up to date
At this point you’ve coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.
Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Microsoft Advertising.
And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Microsoft modifies the Microsoft Advertising API, or if the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.
Other data warehouse options
Panoply is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Azure SQL Data Warehouse, To S3, and To Delta Lake.
Easier and faster alternatives
If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t be alarmed. If you have all the skills necessary to go through this process, chances are building and maintaining a script like this isn’t a very high-leverage use of your time.
Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to move data from Microsoft Advertising to Panoply automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Microsoft Advertising data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Panoply data warehouse.