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.

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.

1. Open a browser and navigate to https://sandbox.bingads.microsoft.com?simpsp=true&id1=1.

2. Select Sign up now.

3. Select Create an account to create a Microsoft account (MSA).

4. Select Get a new email address.

5. Enter an MSA email address. The email server must be outlook.com (for example, [email protected]).

   Important

   Sandbox supports MSAs created using an outlook.com email account only. 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 email account.

6. 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.

7. Fill out the Create Account form.

8. For Go Live, select Skip payment information.

Optional: Invite More Users

To authenticate with OAuth in sandbox, you need a Microsoft account (MSA) created with an outlook.com email account. If your sandbox customer does not yet have user credentials via a Microsoft account, or your sandbox customer was created with an outlook-int.com email account, you need to invite a user to work on your sandbox account via the following steps.

1. In Microsoft Advertising sandbox, select Settings.

2. Select User management.

3. Select Invite user.

4. Enter the email address of the user to invite. The email server must be outlook.com (for example, [email protected]).

   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, [email protected]), the BingAds UI will show the invite as pending indefinitely (the invite is never sent).

5. Select 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.

1. Open the email from Microsoft Advertising with subject line, Invitation to Microsoft Advertising

2. Copy the embedded link and open in an InPrivate mode window or another browser.

3. Select Create an account to create a Microsoft account (MSA).

4. Select Get a new email address.

5. Enter an MSA email address. The email server must be outlook.com (for example, [email protected]).

   Important

   Sandbox supports MSAs created using an outlook.com email account only. 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 email account.

6. Finish the work flow by specifying the rest of your user information

7. Exit Microsoft Advertising after completing the MSA process.

Get API Access

The sandbox and production environments use separate credentials.

This table includes additional sandbox endpoints.

Although in production you must use your own developer token, all Microsoft Advertising customers can use the following universal developer token in sandbox.

BBD37VB98

You must use your own application ID in both production and sandbox (a.k.a. client ID).

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.

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.

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.

1. In the Microsoft Advertising web application select on Tools.
2. Under Management Tools, select on Microsoft Merchant Center.
3. Select Create store, and enter a store name that ends with "sandbox" (case-insensitive).
4. Add your store info, select Product Ads under Catalog settings, and select Finish.
5. In your new store, select Catalog management, and then select Create catalog.
6. Add your catalog name, select Manually upload file later under Catalog feed file, and select 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.

• AccountPerformanceReportRequest
• AdDynamicTextPerformanceReportRequest
• AdGroupPerformanceReportRequest
• AdPerformanceReportRequest
• CallDetailReportRequest
• CampaignPerformanceReportRequest
• DestinationUrlPerformanceReportRequest
• KeywordPerformanceReportRequest
• UserLocationPerformanceReportRequest