Verify and claim your website's URL
Verify and claim your website's URL
If you want to create a Microsoft Merchant Center Store, you need to verify and claim your website.If you want to create a Microsoft Merchant Center Store, you need to verify and claim your website through Bing Webmaster Tools or an existing Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag.
The website destination URL associated with your Microsoft Merchant Center store is used to verify that you indeed own your uploaded product offers. For this reason the Links specified in your catalog feed file must be a sub-path of either this website destination URL or subdomain of this destination URL. Product offers with URLs that are not sub-paths of this website destination URL will be rejected.
The Microsoft account that you use to verify and claim your website depends on if the website has been previously verified on Bing Webmaster Tools. You do not necessarily need to use the same account to verify and claim your site. Details are in the instructions below.
To ensure all your uploaded product URLs are successfully processed, you'll need to verify and claim the right website destination URL.
The best destination URL is the top-level URL of your website, e.g. http://example.com if your product URLs use the format http://example.com/product/path/.
When entering this URL, there are some formatting requirements:
- The URL must start with a protocol: http:// or https://
- No IP addresses: e.g. http://127.0.0.1
- No ports are allowed: e.g. http://example.com:8000
If your website has not been verified via Bing Webmaster Tools, follow the first set of instructions below.
If your website has already been verified via another Microsoft account on Bing Webmaster Tools, you should follow the second set of instructions. Important: For existing URL verification, you should sign in to the Bing Webmaster Tools using the Microsoft account that verified this website.
New URL Verification
If your website has not been verified via Bing Webmaster Tools, follow these steps below to do so:
- Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools using the same Microsoft account that you will use to create your Microsoft Merchant Center store.
- Under My sites, enter your website's destination URL and click Add.
- If you want, you can provide more details about your website, and then click Add.
- You will be taken to a page which details three methods for verifying your website URL. Choose one of the methods and follow the steps to verify your website.
- Successful URL verification will take you to a website dashboard page.
Existing URL Verification
If your website has already been verified via another Microsoft account on Bing Webmaster Tools, follow these steps to associate your Microsoft account, used for Microsoft Advertising, with the URL:
- Sign in to Bing Webmaster Tools using the Microsoft account that verified this website.
- Select the website from the home page.
- Go to the User Management tab on the left panel.
- You will be taken to a page where website users can be added and deleted. Follow the steps to add a new user's email to your website, and then add the Microsoft account used for Microsoft Advertising. Please note: Before you add the new user's email, you need to register it on Bing Webmaster Tools.
If you have a Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag on your site, Microsoft Advertising has already validated your domain. When prompted to verify your site, select Validated via UET tag as your choice for domain validation.
Please note the following:
- If you validate your domain using a UET tag, the tag has to register at least 50 events before the domain appears as an option when you create a Microsoft Merchant Center store. After the 50 events have been registered, it can take an additional 48 hours for the domain to appear on the list.
- If you have several domains, only 100 will appear on the list. Please contact support if you cannot find the domain in the list.
To learn more about UET tags, see FAQ: Universal Event Tracking.
You claim your verified website destination URL by creating a Microsoft Merchant Center store and specifying your website in the “Destination URL” field.
Once you have claimed your Website Destination URL, the next step is to create your Microsoft Merchant Center store.