Bing Ads seems to be running a new test that is sure to concern some advertisers.  Instead of using the ad copy of the advertiser’s choice, they are instead pulling data from the landing page – from meta tags as well as on page data – to display as the description in the ad, which is truncated by Bing Ads, and truncated in multiple spots depending on the advertiser and where Bing is pulling the description from.

Bryant Garvin seems to be the first to notice the description switcheroo, posting screenshots from his own advertisers who are seeing this change from Bing.

I had noticed more instances recently where Bing Ads descriptions were truncated with … but it is hard to know without looking into the account whether it was an ad copy issue or if Bing Ads was truly copying from the landing page. However, Garvin confirmed that it wasn’t any kind of unreleased DSA (Dynamic Search Ads) with Bing.

Where Bing was pulling the copy from varied between ads.

This still seems to be active, here are some examples I spotted.

Garvin was also only seeing this change made on Firefox only.  Neither Chrome nor Safari were using this.  And it seems restricted to desktop only and not mobile.

But as Kirk Williams pointed out, it is kind of scary that Bing Ads might pull random content from the landing page to use as a description, especially when many advertisers spend time and money carefully crafting their ad copy.  We do know both Google and Bing will test things and choose the better converting option, but pulling landing page copy for a description should raise some flags.

It isn’t clear how widespread this test is nor if advertisers can opt out of it.  But  do have a hard time believing that these ads might perform better than the ones the advertisers are choosing