Bing will soon stop displaying phone numbers in plain text, due to a recent change to its editorial policy.
Phone numbers can be seen in Call Extensions or Location Extensions, two features centered on displaying contact information directly in ads. Ads’ titles, bodies, and URLs, among other extensions, will stop featuring phone numbers as early as next month for new marketers. Current campaigns will not be affected by the change until June.
The only caveat is that the ads must remain the same through June. Any updates, including correcting a typo, will automatically apply the new policy checks to the ad.
February’s update will only apply to marketers in the U.S., U.K., Hong Kong, and Taiwan, though Bing expects the new policy to extend to all of its global markets in the near future.
In a blog post earlier today, Albert Wang, a global policy manager with Bing Ads, recommended updating ads sooner than later and using Call Extensions, which allow users to add clickable phone numbers to ads and consumers to place calls directly from the search results.