In 2021, Microsoft (Bing) Ads was a popular platform for affiliate marketers, particularly for direct linking campaigns, because its policies were generally more lenient than Google Ads. Direct linking—the practice of sending ad traffic directly to an affiliate offer's landing page without a pre-sell or landing page of your own—was a common strategy for beginners and was widely used with networks like ClickBank, MaxBounty, and ShareASale.

This tutorial outlines the steps for setting up a direct linking campaign on Microsoft Ads in 2021.

The Core Concept of Direct Linking
The main appeal of direct linking was its simplicity and speed. By not having to build and host your own landing page, you could get a campaign up and running quickly, allowing you to test multiple offers and keywords efficiently.

Step-by-Step Tutorial for 2021
Step 1: Select a Product and Get Your Affiliate Link
Choose an Offer: Go to your chosen affiliate network (ClickBank, MaxBounty, ShareASale) and find a product or offer to promote. It was crucial to pick a product with a strong sales page that was already optimized for conversions.

Get the Link: Get your unique affiliate link, often called a "hoplink" on ClickBank or a "tracking link" on other networks. This link included your affiliate ID so you would get credit for any sales.

Step 2: Set Up a Campaign in Microsoft Ads
Create a New Campaign: In the Microsoft Ads dashboard, you would create a new campaign and choose "Search campaign" as the type.

Campaign Settings:

Budget: Set a daily budget. In 2021, a good starting point for a test campaign was often a modest amount, like $10-20 per day.

Locations: Target specific countries or regions where your offer was available and had a strong sales history.

Bidding Strategy: For a beginner, setting up a manual bid strategy was often recommended so you had full control over how much you paid for each click.

Step 3: Configure Your Ad and the Direct Link
This was the most critical part of a direct linking campaign and was where a few specific settings needed to be correct.

Final URL: In 2021, you could NOT simply paste your raw affiliate link into the "Final URL" field. This would almost always lead to an ad disapproval because the domain of your affiliate link didn't match the final landing page a user would see.

Instead, you would go to the affiliate offer's sales page and copy the URL from the browser's address bar. This was the "Final URL" that your ad would point to.

Tracking Template: This is where you would place your affiliate tracking link. This told Microsoft Ads to forward the user to your affiliate link first, which would then redirect them to the final landing page.

The tracking template field would look something like {lpurl}?affiliate_id={affiliate_id}. You would replace lpurl with your affiliate link. This setup ensured that your ad displayed a clean, compliant domain while still correctly tracking your commission.

Ad Copy and Keywords: You would create a few ad variations for your ad group and target keywords relevant to your offer. The ad copy needed to be compelling and relevant to the keywords you were targeting.

Step 4: The Role of Third-Party Trackers
While you could direct link without one, most serious affiliate marketers in 2021 used a third-party tracking software like ClickMagick.

Tracking: A third-party tracker was used to monitor which keywords, ad copy, and campaigns were profitable. It gave you granular data that the Bing Ads platform didn't always provide.

Cloaking: Some affiliates used these tools to "cloak" their affiliate links, which helped them avoid ad disapprovals in certain situations and protect their links from being scraped by competitors.

By 2021, Microsoft had introduced parallel tracking, which meant that your tracking template had to be configured correctly to ensure your affiliate link was still being hit while the user was being sent directly to the landing page. Many tutorials from that year emphasized the importance of this setting, recommending that you turn auto-tagging to "ON" in your account settings to avoid errors.