Hi mkmossop,

Sounds like a case of the blind leading the blind.

Bing Ads customer service agent does not equal marketing expert. They are great for helping you get your payment details squared away, but they are not going to help you with a 3rd party system they have likely never even heard of, much less support.

The term "tracking template" as coined by Google AdWords refers to a way of setting up and managing URL parameters as a template within the ad platform's interface.

By utilizing a template, you can setup your URL tracking parameters within the template and then apply those URL parameters to an entire ad group, campaign, or even the entire account simply by choosing the scope of your template.

This video explains what tracking templates are and how to use them:

Upgraded URLs in Bing Ads makes it easier to manage your tracking URLs - YouTube
Since you are apparently marketing products/services for affiliate merchants then you need to get the URL parameters required by your affiliate tracking system. That varies a great deal based on which merchant affiliate network system used, landing page strategy, and the various marketing analytic applications utilized.

The actual URL parameters you need to place in the template is determined by the affiliate hoplinks, or checkout URL parameters required by the affiliate network you are utilizing, plus any marketing/conversion tracking application URL parameters required to track what you want to track.

To clarify, you need to supply URL parameters to the Affiliate Networks' tacking system to get credit for traffic you refer to that affiliated merchant, if you want to get paid. In addition you may also want to include optional URL parameters to feed data to any 3rd party conversion tracking app you might be utilizing. This is often needed because many Affiliate networks do not provide the option to place 3rd party marketing tags like the Bing Ads UET tag, Google Tag Manager, nor Google Analytics, etc. onto their checkout pages. So, any marketing data you want to get out of the Affiliate Network system must pass through in the form of URL parameters that are supported by that particular affiliate network.

How you retrieve the marketing data you passed to optional URL parameters will vary based on the options provided by your affiliate network and the methods supported by your marketing analytics application. Implementation is actually a systems integration task and can get pretty technical. It might be wise to get help from an experienced systems integration technician, or someone with a lot of prior experience in marketing analytic data implementation.

Lack of proper marketing analytics is a significant contributing factor to many failed marketing campaigns. Marketing analytics for affiliate marketers tends to be highly complex to implement and maintain, so be aware of this going in. Plan on getting some expert help, or to dedicate a lot of time to learn how to do this essential task for affiliate marketing.

HTH,

Don Burk