New Bing Editorial Policy Disallows Phone Numbers In Plain Text

Due to a recent change to its editorial policy, Bing has announced that it will soon stop displaying phone numbers in plain text. Phone numbers will only be allowed through Call Extensions or Location Extensions, two features centered on displaying contact information directly in ads. However, ad’s titles, bodies and URLs, among other extensions, will stop featuring phone numbers as early as next month for new marketers. For existing campaigns, they will not be affected by the change until June, provided that no other changes are made to those campaigns in the meantime.

What else do marketers need to know about this change?

“Any updates made to your ads once this policy change goes into effect – even those that have nothing to do with the use of a phone number – will cause the new policy checks to be applied to those ads that were edited,” Bing explained in its blog post. “For example, if your ad features a phone number in the ad text and in March 2015, you edit your ad to fix a typo, you may then experience a rejection based on the presence of a phone number in ad text.”

Bing explained that although untouched existing ads with phone numbers will remain as they are until June 2015, any ads that are not in compliance with this editorial policy after that point may be rejected and will therefore stop serving until the required changes are made.

“Although only the United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong and Taiwan will be affected by the policy change next month, it is reasonable to expect this policy to be deployed in all markets, globally at some point in the near future,” explained Bing. “Therefore, we recommend that you start updating all of your ads that currently include a phone number in the title, body, URL or any other ad extension (other than Call and Location Extensions) in preparation for this change.”

Bing recommends that those who have ads in markets that disallow phone numbers in the ad copy should update all of their campaigns to remove them and should start using Call Extensions to avoid experiencing a rejection due to including a phone number in the ad copy. Call Extensions allow users to add clickable phone numbers to ads and allow consumers to place calls directly from the search results.