How to start to publish the venue information on Bing, and what to know about the way of working with the platform?
Bing is a local marketing platform that has a direct integration with Localistico. This means that Localistico publishes the location data directly via API to Bing Places which feeds the data on Bing Maps (same way as we publish the data on Google My Business that feeds the data on Google Maps and Search.)
Because of Bing's policies, the partnership with the platform allows us to publish the data on our whitelisted account. If you have your own Bing account, it cannot be used to update your data on Bing Places. Before starting to publish your data on Bing, it's important to:
- Make sure that you don't have existing Bing profiles created if you already have a Bing account. If you do have, those profiles needs to be deleted, or they may cause duplication issues.
- Provide Localistico support team with an email address and a generic website that we can use to configure Bing for you. Those are used internally only for the set-up and currently they are not visible for the customers. You can contact to our support team by emailing to support@localistico.com.
- Make sure that all locations have a venue ID and region added, since these are mandatory for Bing.
- Add at least one Bing business category. You can read more about categories from this article.
- Bing Maps is only available in some countries. Verify from this list that your country is already supported on Bing.
Once our support team has configured Bing for you and published on Bing Places, it takes about 15 days until the profiles appear on Bing Maps. This is the time that Bing takes to verify the profiles and index them with profiles that can be found from the other platforms such as TripAdvisor. Please note that in some cases, the period may be even longer.
Please be aware that Bing may choose not to display your website if it detects a version without UTM parameters. To improve the chances of your website being featured on Bing Maps and Search, it is advisable to submit a version of your website that does not include UTM parameters.