Tell HN: Bing appending tracking ID to destination URLs

31 points·assttoasstmgr··9 comments

Just noticed this in Edge Beta v100. Perhaps some A/B testing thing. Bing appends a "msclkid" unique hash to the destination URL querystring of search results (not ads or sponsored links) which can be read by the destination site for purposes of ad tracking.

https://help.ads.microsoft.com/#apex/ads/en/60125/2

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This is so advertiser spending money can report back which ads worked or not. Google has the same thing it’s a gclid. Both of these are well documented features for search ads and display ads to securely communicate a conversation event back to ad platforms. Remember when you click a paid ad someone is spending money. How else would you like to see it work? Also in case you were wondering these are opt in features by the user of the ad service. Typically called auto tagging

This was happening on all search results (not just ads or sponsored links). I have updated the summary to clarify.

All Facebook links have had a fbclid added to them for years now for the same reason, that's where I remember seeing these first.

ClearURLs is a nice extension for ditching URL tracking, though it looks like they haven't yet added a rule for Bing.

Facebook, Google, Pinterest, LinkedIn, all have been doing this for years... nothing to see here

Is Bing doing it, or is it actually the browser? I'm not using Edge and I don't see any odd modifications to URLs in the search results.

Hasn't Google been doing that for over a decade?

Not for organic links, and as I understand OP, Bing is adding the ClickID organic links, too. Though I'm not able to reproduce that.

isn’t this what most companies that make most of their money based on ads do?

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