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Logging in to BingAds - extremely difficult

jasimon9
jasimon9
Community Member
in Mac

Logging in to Microsofts Bing Ads is extraordinarily difficult and requires a convoluted path. I have tried many combinations, but cannot set up a 1Password login to just work. I have to add, that just logging without any password manager is also very difficult, and you can go around and around.

I am hoping you can help me figure this out.

The problem is partly the convoluted redirecting that happens. It takes you to a site (login.live.com), then another site, then you try to login, and it says you can't login, but have to go elsewhere, or use some microsoft identity or other. There are numerous variations and lead to great frustration if you do not do it exactly right.

Here is what works to login:

  1. Make sure all tabs on your browser are close, and that the browser is closed.
  2. Start a new browser (if you don't, you might get into loops where you get blank web pages -- cannot even get to the site)
  3. Go to bingads.com (do not use anything else other than literally "bingads.com")
  4. Get a blank page.
  5. Close the browser
  6. bingads.com, and this time it automatically logs you in via cookie without password (after I just logged out!)
  7. Sign out again.
  8. The sign out page hangs with a blank page.
  9. Switch to Firefox
  10. Go to bingads.com
  11. It wants you to sign in, or "sign in with a Microsoft account"
  12. put in my user name
  13. It then says "to sign in with your email address, go to Microsoft account sign in"
  14. But I have spend hours trying to do that and it does not work
  15. And on and on and on.
  16. I would like to give you more steps, but I have to restart this browser now. When I come back to this ticket, maybe I will start over with more blow by blow.

I was wrong -- I thought I was going to give a working pathway, but looks like I cannot login to Bing Ads at all. I have had this experience many times before, and have spend hours with people from India trying to help me.

In addition to the above frustration, 1Password always displays a long list of unrelated accounts, and I have to always type "bingads" to get the real one. That is because it is matching on live.com or something instead of Bing Ads.

This is a typical example of how buggy, broken and poorly design Bing is and MSN AdCenter before it was probably even worse.

1Password Version: Not Provided
Extension Version: Not Provided
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Comments

  • jasimon9
    jasimon9
    Community Member

    Ok, I am back, and I think I might have a more concrete pathway to login to BingAds. These steps are with Chrome:

    1. Clear cookies.
    2. goto bingads.com
    3. Get a Yahoo/Bing login
    4. Type in email address used as login
    5. Site says you have to click on a link to use an email address to login - click it
    6. Takes you to a different site (login.live.com ....)
    7. Try to have 1Password fill the login form -- oddly, it fills the password but not the login (usually when it partly fails it is the other way around).
    8. type in the email address
    9. Logged in! Yay! -- to bingads.microsoft.com
    10. Try to logout
    11. Site hangs on trying to log out (I have seen this a dozen times today already) and leaves you logged in.
    12. Come back with new instance of browser and it just logs you in without credentials, because of the issue on not being able to log out. This is very confusing because you are now trying to login using various methods, and at this point they seem to work, because in fact, anything works as you are still logged in from before.

    The above steps are repeatable, and occur in that exact way every time.

    This is a combination of a buggy Bing site (has been that way ever since Bing was created out of MSN). That is, I had the same experience on day one with that site after it migrated from its predecessor, MSN AdCenter. Proves that Microsoft is in its declining years if they don't care to fix basic issues with logging in to their supposedly money-making website over a period of probably three years now.

    My point in bringing this to your attention is that it might behoove you to prevent some of the idiocy that I went through above. Although I would not find fault if you deemed there was nothing you can do with broken websites.

    As a result of the above, I have taken the following steps to partly alleviate the nonsense:

    • changed the website stored in the 1Password login to one going directly to the site in step 6 above (login.live.com plus long URL)
    • removed all the passwords from 1P for related sites that were making it hard for 1Password to match all the redirected sites
    • checked about the inability to logout - it seems to occur on Chrome, but not on Firefox, nor Internet Explorer.

    After documenting all of the above, I really don't see anything that 1Password could do to make things better. So this ticket can be closed. Maybe it will help somebody else.

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @jasimon9,

    I'm really sorry you've been fighting with their site, logging in shouldn't feel like you need a bard in one corner to write about you deeds of valour on the battlefield.

    Is this the URL you ended up saving?

    https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rpsnv=12&ct=1441377116&rver=6.5.6509.0&wp=MBI_SSL&wreply=https:%2F%2Fsecure.bingads.microsoft.com%2FLogin%2FLive%3Fs_int%3Dvanity_bingads-com&lc=2057&id=288120

    I added that to a Microsoft account I have and using open and fill, where you click on the URL stored in the Login item it did fill in the Login as you would expect and then I get taken to a page telling me

    There is no Bing Ads account associated with this email address

    which does kind of feel like I was being taken in the right direction. Now that URL shouldn't contain anything personal as nothing personal had been entered at that point.

    If you have a Microsoft account that you use exclusively for Bing Ads you could store that as the primary URL so open and fill for that Login item always logs you into Bing Ads. If the account serves more than that single role then it probably means manually selecting the right URL. You do kind of hope stuff like this shouldn't be where time is spent though.

  • jasimon9
    jasimon9
    Community Member
    edited September 2015

    Thanks for your sympathetic response. The link that I have is as follows:

    https://login.live.com/login.srf?wa=wsignin1.0&rpsnv=12&ct=1441332611&rver=6.5.6509.0&wp=MBI_SSL&wreply=https:%2F%2Fsecure.bingads.microsoft.com%2FLogin%2FLive%3Fs_int%3Dvanity_bingads-com&lc=1033&id=288120

    It looks similar to what you have posted. It is the link generated by Microsoft as I go through the described steps, and allows me to skip the first few steps. But it does not always work in an open browser, and sometimes requires a new browser instance or cookies cleared.

    Here are steps that now seem to work using 1P mini:

    1. Close your browser and open a new instance (not always necessary, but often get weird results and this works around them).
    2. Use 1P mini to access site and start to login.
    3. Manually enter the email address as username
    4. Click Sign In.

    Here are "weird results" I have gotten today:
    1. With 1P mini, "nothing happens" when try to open and fill. Just get a blank white page.
    2. Got 500 error (server)
    3. Get 404 error

    I can send you screencasts, if you would like to see the fiasco. And if you need an example of a buggy, broken, poorly-designed site, bingads.com aka all the other actual URLs is your ticket.

    The one thing that AgileBits might look at is why the user name pasting does not work. It actually works for a second, and then the site clears it. (I have noticed this issue with other sites too.)

    If you don't have a BingAds account, it costs nothing to create one. The idea would be you are going to theoretically use their per-per-click service, so you create the account. But then you just never use it, or delete it.

    Hope this helps!

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hello @jasimon9,

    Now the field being cleared. Technically it is possible that a site looks for the paste event and then uses JavaScript to reset the field. That is certainly one possibility as well as a site having the ability to disable pasting. I'm not experiencing it when trying to log into BingAds though. Can I ask, what other extensions do you use and what happens if you consider the following:

    1. Disable all extensions (feel free to leave ours running if you want).
    2. Clear the cache and cookies.
    3. Close and re-launch your browser.

    Does the site behave any better at all? It might not but sometimes you can get very weird interactions with certain extensions, especially as the popular ones like AdBlock, Ghostery etc. are all about dynamically altering the page on load. We've had instances recently of Flashblock and AdBlock both interfering with 1Password for example so maybe something is cause some screwy behaviour here too?

    On the cookies front. I use an application to purge cookies on close of my browsers but sadly it doesn't have a way of only purging the cookie for that one annoying site, instead you set up a whitelist. If you're interested at all the application is literally called Cookie and it's available in the Apple Mac App Store. I started using it on the recommendation of a user here in the forums and it does suit my needs. That's just a thought but as I say, it's about setting up a whitelist and purging everything else so it might not fit your needs.

    I don't know if anything here will help but fingers crossed. You definitely have been through the mill as they say battling this one.

  • jasimon9
    jasimon9
    Community Member

    I don't think I use those kinds of extensions, and find it much easier to believe that the Microsoft site is buggy based on past experience, or that it is one of those sites the just blocks pasting in to login/password fields as a security precaution.

    Here are my extensions: 1Password, MozBar, OpenSEO Stats, Page Analytics by Google, Super Auto Refresh, Web Snapper Extension, Window Resizer, Xmarks.

    I

  • littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables
    1Password Alumni

    Hi @jasimon9,

    Yup, the only one I recognise at all from that list is ours, I've definitely not used any of the others myself. It's up to yourself and I can understand why you'd be tempted to cast a dirty look towards Microsoft but the reason I suggested disabling the extensions is sometimes you can see weird interactions. For example with the aid of another user we tweaked our extension because of a timing issue. The user was creating some JavaScript and found if they used a certain JavaScript library it didn't play well with us. If you're wondering timing issues are a pain because it isn't what you're doing, it's when - lovely to debug :tongue:

    On the other hand it might not be the extensions at all and their site just is a bit rubbish, both are entirely possible :smile:

This discussion has been closed.