Microsoft Advertising Sandbox
Microsoft Advertising provides an API sandbox environment where you can test your application before deploying it to the production environment. Ads that you create in sandbox are not served. Supported services in sandbox vary from production. To get the web service addresses for supported services, see Bing Ads API Web Service Addresses.
Note
Sandbox may be down for maintenance, with or without prior notification.
Initial Customer Sign Up
The sandbox and production environments use separate credentials.
Follow these steps to get a new sandbox customer. If you already have a sandbox customer and want to add a new user e.g., with Microsoft account credentials, you can skip to the user invitation steps.
Open a browser and navigate to https://sandbox.bingads.microsoft.com?simpsp=true.
Click Sign up for Microsoft Advertising or Sign up now
Select Create a new email address to create an MSA. Do not use an existing email address.
Click Next
Enter an MSA email address. The email server must be outlook-int.com (for example, someone@outlook-int.com).
Important
Sandbox supports MSAs created using an outlook-int.com email account only. You may not use an outlook.com email account. Also, you may not use an email account from another email service (for example, @contoso.com) even if the account is linked to an outlook.com or outlook-int.com email account.
Finish the MSA work flow by specifying the rest of your user and security information. You will then be redirected to Microsoft Advertising to continue the sandbox customer and account sign up.
Fill out the Create Account form
For Import/Create Campaign, click Skip campaign creation
For Go Live, click Skip payment information
Invite More Users
To authenticate with OAuth in sandbox, you need a sandbox Microsoft account (MSA). If your sandbox customer does not yet have user credentials via a Microsoft account, you need to invite a user to work on your sandbox account via the following steps.
In Microsoft Advertising sandbox, click your user name (upper right corner)
Click Accounts & Billing
Click Users
Click Invite user
Enter the email address of the user to invite. The email server must be outlook.com (for example, someone@outlook.com).
Important
You may send invites to outlook.com email accounts only. You may not send invites to any other domain, even if the account is linked to an outlook.com email account. If you try to send an invite to another domain (for example, someone@contoso.com), the BingAds UI will show the invite as pending indefinitely (the invite is never sent).
Click Send
Microsoft Advertising sends an email invite to the user. If the invite doesn't show up in the inbox, check the Junk Email folder. It may take a couple of minutes to receive the invite. The following steps show how to accept the invitation.
Open the email from Microsoft Advertising with subject line, Invitation to Microsoft Advertising
Click the embedded link
Select Create a new email address to create an MSA. Do not use an existing email address.
Click Next
Enter an MSA email address. The email server must be outlook-int.com (for example, someone@outlook-int.com).
Important
Sandbox supports MSAs created using an outlook-int.com email account only. You may not use an outlook.com email account. Also, you may not use an email account from another email service (for example, @contoso.com) even if the account is linked to an outlook.com or outlook-int.com email account.
Finish the work flow by specifying the rest of your user information
Exit Microsoft Advertising after completing the MSA process.
Note
The MSA signup process returns you to the SI Microsoft Advertising user interface (ui.si.bingads.microsoft.com). After completing the MSA process, sign out of the SI interface and then sign in using your new outlook-int.com email address at https://secure.sandbox.bingads.microsoft.com/.
Get API Access
The sandbox and production environments use separate credentials.
For the sandbox environment, substitute https://login.microsoftonline.com/common with https://login.windows-ppe.net/consumers.
This table includes additional sandbox endpoints.
| Description | Production | Sandbox |
|---|---|---|
| Endpoint for OAuth requests | login.microsoftonline.com | login.windows-ppe.net |
| Domain for email used when getting a Microsoft account | Any email address | outlook-int.com |
| Endpoint to change the Microsoft account password | account.live.com/password/change | account.live-int.com/password/change |
Although in production you must use your own developer token, all Microsoft Advertising customers can use the following universal developer token in sandbox.
BBD37VB98
Although in production you must use your own application ID (a.k.a. client ID), all Microsoft Advertising customers can use the following public application ID in sandbox. The "Tutorial Sample App" client ID is limited to desktop or console applications, and cannot be used with any client secret in a web application.
4c0b021c-00c3-4508-838f-d3127e8167ff
Now you can get access and refresh tokens for your Microsoft Advertising user and make your first service call using the Bing Ads API, see the Quick Start guide.
Tip
For details about how to get access and refresh tokens using the Bing Ads SDKs, see Authentication With the SDKs.
Sandbox Best Practices
Sandbox should not be used in the same capacity as production.
- Make sure that when you deploy your application to the production environment, you use the production WSDLs and your production credentials.
- Sandbox contains the current production release, and will be updated with feature previews with or without prior notification.
- Capacity of the sandbox is less than that of production, and you should not use it to perform stress or capacity testing.
- Please do not use more than one thread.
Ad Insight Service
Sandbox supports a limited set of keywords for testing Ad Insight service operations. You should not use the test data to infer or expect similar estimates for your keywords in production. Some of the limitations are described in the following table.
Tip
Use the Ad Insight service in production instead of sandbox. Sandbox only offers a subset of production service operations, and the insight data lags behind production. Sandbox opportunity data is refreshed and updated each weekend, and is available by Monday. The keyword idea data in sandbox may lag behind production by several months. If an operation fails due to an invalid date range, try submitting the request again with an earlier date range.
| Service Operation | Sandbox Limitations |
|---|---|
| GetBidLandscapeByKeywordIds | Not supported. You can call the operation with existing keyword identifiers, but no data is returned. |
| GetEstimatedBidByKeywordIds | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. |
| GetEstimatedBidByKeywords | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. |
| GetEstimatedPositionByKeywordIds | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. To increase chance of getting an estimate, the MaxBid element should be more than or equal to 5 US Dollar, or the equivalent in other currencies. |
| GetEstimatedPositionByKeywords | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. To increase chance of getting an estimate, the MaxBid element should be more than or equal to 5 US Dollar, or the equivalent in other currencies. |
| GetHistoricalKeywordPerformance | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. The MatchType and AdPosition elements must be set to Aggregate. The Devices element must be set to Computers or left nil. |
| GetHistoricalSearchCount | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. The EndMonthAndYear element must be set to the previous month. For example if today's date is April 1, 2020, the end month should be March 2020. The Devices element must be set to Computers or left nil. |
| GetKeywordCategories | There should be no difference in sandbox versus production. |
| GetKeywordDemographics | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. The Devices element must be set to Computers or left nil. |
| GetKeywordIdeas | Sandbox test data is refreshed every 3 months, so you will need to set an earlier dater range. |
| GetKeywordLocations | A limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. The Devices element must be set to Computers or left nil. |
| SuggestKeywordsForUrl | There should be no difference in sandbox versus production. |
| SuggestKeywordsFromExistingKeywords | If the SuggestionType is set to 1, there should be no difference in behavior compared to production. For suggestion type values 2, 3, and 4, a limited set of keywords are supported: air, auto, best deals, booking, car information, care, deal of the day, discounts, entertainment, finances, games, hotel reviews, insurance comparison, sport, the hotel. |
Bulk Service
The file size limit for upload in production is 100MB or 2.5 million rows. For sandbox the limit is 20K rows. For more information, see Bulk Download and Upload.
Campaign Management Service
Editorial Support
Sandbox supports limited editorial reviews and appeals. You cannot get the reasons for editorial issues in sandbox as you could in production, for example via the GetEditorialReasonsByIds service operation.
Product Ads
Product ads are supported in sandbox in the United States. To be auto-approved you must create a catalog and a Microsoft Merchant Center store that ends with "sandbox" as follows.
In the Microsoft Advertising web application click on Tools.
Under Management Tools, click on Microsoft Merchant Center.
Click Create store, and enter a store name that ends with "sandbox" (case-insensitive).
Add your store info, select Product Ads under Catalog settings, and click Finish.
In your new store, click Catalog management, and then click Create catalog.
Add your catalog name, select Manually upload file later under Catalog feed file, and click Save.
Customer Billing Service
Payment methods are not supported in sandbox.
Reporting Service
When you create a keyword, test performance data should be generated within a few hours. The data is provided to test generating, retrieving, and parsing reports in the sandbox. You should not use the test data to infer or expect similar performance for your keywords in production.
Test data is generated only for the same day when the entity was added or updated. For example if you add a keyword today and download a keyword performance report for last week, there won't be any data. You would have to pull a report that includes today in the report time period.
The following reports can return performance data in sandbox. All other report types can be submitted successfully, although the sandbox service will not return any example data i.e., the report download URL will be not be set when you poll for results.