Bing Advertising: The Channel Most Budgets Underestimate

Bing advertising gives you access to a search audience that Google doesn’t fully capture, at a cost-per-click that is consistently lower, with less competition on most keywords. That’s not a niche advantage. For the right business, it’s a meaningful budget efficiency that compounds over time.

Most media plans I’ve reviewed over the years treat Microsoft Advertising as an afterthought, a checkbox after Google Search gets its allocation. That’s a habit, not a strategy. And habits in media planning tend to cost money quietly, without anyone noticing.

Why Bing Gets Dismissed Before It Gets Evaluated

There’s a pattern I’ve seen repeat itself across agencies and in-house teams. A new channel gets evaluated based on its market share number rather than its audience fit. Bing has roughly 6 to 9 percent of the UK and US search market depending on the source and the quarter. That number gets quoted, someone in the room says “it’s not worth the management overhead,” and the conversation ends.

That logic would make sense if search audiences were identical across platforms. They aren’t. The Microsoft Search Network, which includes Bing, Yahoo, and AOL, reaches a demographic that skews meaningfully older, more educated, and with higher household income than the average Google user. On desktop specifically, that gap is even more pronounced. If you’re selling financial products, enterprise software, B2B services, or anything where the buyer profile matches that description, the channel deserves a proper look, not a dismissal based on aggregate share.

I spent a stretch of my career overvaluing lower-funnel performance signals. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to recognise that a lot of what we were crediting to search was demand that already existed, and we were just intercepting it. The same logic applies here. Bing isn’t going to create demand that doesn’t exist. But if your buyers are searching on Bing and you’re not there, someone else is capturing that intent. That’s a straightforward commercial problem.

If you’re thinking about channel allocation within a broader go-to-market plan, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers how to sequence and prioritise channels against business objectives rather than convention.

What the Microsoft Search Network Actually Covers

Microsoft Advertising runs across Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and a network of partner sites. It also powers search on Windows devices, Cortana, and Microsoft Edge, which is the default browser on every Windows machine. That last point matters more than most people realise. Edge has been gaining users steadily as Microsoft has integrated it more tightly into the Windows experience, and every Edge user who searches from the address bar is searching on Bing by default.

The platform also includes the Microsoft Audience Network, which extends placements to MSN, Outlook, and other Microsoft properties. These are display and native formats rather than pure search, and they operate differently in terms of intent and conversion behaviour. For most advertisers starting out, the core search inventory is where to focus first.

One capability that genuinely differentiates Microsoft Advertising from Google is LinkedIn profile targeting. Through a data partnership with LinkedIn, Microsoft allows advertisers to layer LinkedIn audience attributes, company, industry, job function, seniority, onto their Bing search campaigns. There is no Google equivalent for this. For B2B advertisers trying to reach decision-makers by role or by company type, that’s a meaningful capability that the channel’s market share number doesn’t capture.

The CPC Advantage: Real, But Not the Whole Story

Lower cost-per-click is the most commonly cited reason to test Bing advertising. It’s a legitimate point. Because there are fewer advertisers competing for the same keywords, auction pressure is lower, and CPCs tend to run below Google equivalents on most terms. In competitive categories like legal, financial services, and insurance, that gap can be substantial.

But CPC is an input metric, not an outcome. What matters is cost per acquisition, and that depends on conversion rate, not just click cost. If Bing traffic converts at a lower rate than Google traffic on the same keywords, the CPC advantage narrows or disappears. This is where a lot of Bing tests fail quietly. The team imports Google campaigns, runs them for four weeks, sees a higher CPA than Google, and concludes the channel doesn’t work. What they’ve actually learned is that a Google campaign doesn’t automatically perform on Bing without adjustment.

The import tool in Microsoft Advertising is genuinely useful for getting campaigns live quickly. It’s not a substitute for thinking about the audience. Bing users tend to be older and more desktop-focused. Landing pages that are optimised for mobile-first Google traffic may not convert as well on a desktop-heavy Bing audience. Ad copy that performs on Google may not land the same way with a different demographic. These aren’t insurmountable problems, but they require attention.

I’ve seen this play out across enough accounts to know that the teams who get the most from Bing are the ones who treat it as its own channel with its own optimisation cycle, not a Google mirror that runs on autopilot.

Setting Up Microsoft Advertising Properly

The mechanics of Microsoft Advertising are deliberately similar to Google Ads. Campaign types, bidding strategies, keyword match types, ad extensions (now called assets), and audience targeting all have direct equivalents. If you’ve run Google Ads, the platform won’t feel unfamiliar. That similarity is intentional and it’s part of why the import function works as well as it does.

A few structural decisions are worth getting right from the start. First, keep Bing campaigns separate from Google campaigns in your reporting and budget allocation. Blending them makes it impossible to understand channel-level performance and attribution. Second, set up conversion tracking independently in Microsoft Advertising rather than relying solely on imported Google conversion data. The platforms handle attribution differently and you want clean, native data. Third, enable auto-tagging so that Bing traffic is properly identified in your analytics platform and doesn’t get lumped into organic or direct.

On bidding, the same general principles apply as Google. Start with manual CPC or enhanced CPC while you build conversion data, then move to target CPA or target ROAS once you have enough volume for the algorithm to work with. Microsoft’s smart bidding has improved considerably, but it needs data to function well. Rushing into automated bidding on a thin dataset produces erratic results on any platform.

Keyword strategy should mirror your Google approach initially, but review search term reports separately. Bing users sometimes phrase queries differently, and you’ll find terms worth adding or excluding that wouldn’t appear in a Google search term report. The search behaviour isn’t identical, and your negative keyword list in particular should be built from Bing’s own data over time.

Where Bing Advertising Tends to Perform Best

Not every category benefits equally. The channels where I’ve seen the strongest Bing performance tend to share a few characteristics: the buyer is older or more senior, the purchase decision is considered rather than impulsive, the product or service has a longer sales cycle, and the category is competitive enough on Google that CPCs are painful.

B2B technology and software consistently shows strong Bing performance, partly because of the LinkedIn targeting capability and partly because enterprise buyers tend to be on managed Windows devices with Bing as the default. Financial services, including insurance, investment products, and mortgages, performs well because the audience skew aligns with the buyer profile. Legal services, healthcare services, and home improvement categories also tend to index well.

Categories that tend to underperform on Bing include youth-oriented consumer products, fashion and apparel, and anything where mobile is the primary purchase channel. The Bing audience is desktop-heavy, and if your conversion experience is built around mobile, you’re working against the channel’s natural strengths.

This connects to a broader point about channel selection. The question isn’t whether a channel has scale. It’s whether the channel’s audience matches your buyer. I’ve judged enough Effie submissions to know that the campaigns that win aren’t the ones that used the most channels. They’re the ones that understood where their audience actually was and showed up there with something relevant.

For context on how channel selection fits into broader growth thinking, Vidyard’s piece on why go-to-market feels harder captures something real about the complexity of modern channel decisions, and why frameworks matter more than instinct.

Microsoft Advertising’s LinkedIn Targeting: The Underused Advantage

This deserves its own section because it’s genuinely distinctive and most B2B advertisers aren’t using it as well as they could.

Through Microsoft’s ownership of LinkedIn, Bing search campaigns can be layered with LinkedIn profile data. That means you can bid differently, or include and exclude audiences, based on job function, seniority level, industry, company size, or specific company names. You’re still buying search intent, but you can weight that intent by who the searcher is in a professional context.

The practical application is straightforward. If you’re selling HR software and someone searches for “employee engagement platform,” you can bid more aggressively when that searcher’s LinkedIn profile indicates they work in HR at a company with more than 500 employees. If you’re selling to CFOs, you can suppress clicks from junior finance roles who are unlikely to have budget authority. None of this is possible on Google.

The targeting works as an observation or bid adjustment layer rather than a hard filter, which means you don’t lose reach entirely when LinkedIn data isn’t available for a given user. It’s a refinement tool, not a restriction. Used properly, it can improve conversion rates meaningfully by concentrating spend on the segments most likely to convert.

Early in my career I would have been sceptical of this kind of targeting because the data quality on B2B audiences was often poor. LinkedIn data is different. People maintain their professional profiles with more care than most other data sources because it’s tied to their professional identity. That makes it more reliable as a targeting signal than third-party B2B data from most other sources.

Measurement and Attribution on Bing

One of the quieter problems with Bing advertising is that it often gets evaluated against Google using Google’s attribution logic. That’s not a neutral comparison. If your primary attribution model credits last-click Google Search, Bing’s contribution to assisted conversions or upper-funnel influence will be systematically undercounted. The channel looks worse than it is because the measurement is built around a different channel.

The honest approach is to use data-driven attribution where you have enough volume, look at assisted conversion data alongside last-click, and consider incrementality testing if Bing represents a meaningful portion of your budget. Pausing Bing for a defined period in a test market and measuring the impact on total conversions is imperfect but informative. It tells you whether Bing is genuinely adding volume or simply capturing conversions that would have happened through another channel anyway.

I’ve seen this test run in both directions. Sometimes Bing is genuinely incremental, particularly in categories where the Bing audience doesn’t overlap heavily with Google. Sometimes it’s largely duplicative, and the budget is better deployed elsewhere. The test is worth running before you scale the channel significantly, because the CPC advantage only creates real value if the conversions are additive.

On tracking setup, Universal Event Tracking (UET) is Microsoft’s equivalent of the Google Tag. It needs to be implemented correctly and tested before you rely on conversion data. Common issues include tag firing on page load rather than on conversion events, or import settings that pull Google conversion definitions without adapting them to Bing’s tracking requirements. These are fixable problems, but they need to be caught early rather than discovered weeks into a campaign when the data is already compromised.

Budget Allocation: How Much to Commit to Bing

There’s no universal answer, but there are sensible starting points. For most advertisers running established Google Search campaigns, a Bing test at 10 to 15 percent of the Google Search budget gives you enough volume to generate meaningful data without overcommitting before you understand performance. That’s enough to run for six to eight weeks, accumulate conversion data, and make an informed decision about whether to scale.

If the test shows a CPA within range of Google and evidence of incremental volume, the case for increasing Bing’s share of budget becomes straightforward. If CPA is significantly higher and conversion rates are weak, the question is whether the issue is structural (wrong category, wrong audience) or executional (poor landing page fit, weak ad copy, wrong bidding strategy). Executional problems are worth fixing. Structural problems are a signal to redeploy the budget.

For B2B advertisers specifically, the LinkedIn targeting capability changes the calculus somewhat. Even if raw Bing volumes are modest, the ability to reach senior decision-makers in search mode, at a lower CPC than Google, with LinkedIn-quality audience data, can justify a higher budget allocation than the channel’s market share would suggest.

The broader principle here is that budget allocation should follow evidence, not convention. The convention is to put most search budget into Google because Google has the most search volume. That’s not wrong, but it’s incomplete. A channel that reaches 7 percent of searchers but converts at a higher rate among your specific buyer profile may deserve more than 7 percent of your search budget. The math should drive the decision.

For a wider view of how channel investment decisions fit into go-to-market planning, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the frameworks that make these allocation decisions more rigorous and less arbitrary.

Common Mistakes That Undermine Bing Campaigns

The most consistent mistake is treating Bing as a set-and-forget channel. Campaigns get imported from Google, budgets get assigned, and then the account gets reviewed quarterly if it gets reviewed at all. This produces mediocre results and confirms the bias that Bing isn’t worth the effort. It’s a self-fulfilling conclusion.

The second most common mistake is failing to adapt creative and landing pages for the Bing audience. If your Google campaigns are optimised for mobile-first behaviour and your Bing audience is predominantly on desktop, you’re showing the wrong experience to the right people. Desktop landing pages have more room for content, longer forms tend to work better, and the user’s context is different from someone searching on a phone between meetings.

Third is ignoring the search term report. Microsoft’s search partner network can generate irrelevant traffic if match types aren’t managed carefully. Broad match in particular can drift significantly on Bing, and without regular negative keyword management, you’ll accumulate spend on queries that have no commercial relevance. This is true on Google too, but the partner network on Microsoft means the problem can compound faster.

Fourth is underusing ad extensions. Microsoft Advertising supports sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call extensions, location extensions, and more. Accounts that run bare-bones text ads without extensions leave impression share and click-through rate on the table. The extensions are free in the sense that you only pay for clicks, and they meaningfully improve the quality and visibility of your ads.

Fifth, and this connects to the measurement point above, is evaluating Bing in isolation from the full conversion path. If you’re looking only at last-click Bing conversions and comparing them to last-click Google conversions, you’re not seeing the full picture. Bing may be doing more work in the funnel than the attribution model shows.

Bing Shopping and Performance Max Equivalents

For retail and e-commerce advertisers, Microsoft Shopping campaigns operate on the same product feed logic as Google Shopping. You connect a product catalogue through Microsoft Merchant Center, and ads are served based on product data rather than keyword bids. The setup process is similar to Google, and if you’re already running a well-maintained Google Merchant Center feed, the migration is relatively straightforward.

Microsoft has also introduced its own version of Performance Max, called Performance Max campaigns in Microsoft Advertising, which automate placement across search, audience, and shopping inventory. As with Google’s version, these campaigns trade control for automation. They can work well when you have strong conversion data and clear goals, but they’re harder to diagnose when performance drops because the campaign logic is less transparent.

My general view on fully automated campaign types, on any platform, is that they work best as a complement to well-structured manual or smart bidding campaigns rather than a replacement. The automation is only as good as the signal you feed it, and that signal comes from having clean conversion tracking, clear goals, and enough volume for the algorithm to learn from. Start with structure, then add automation.

For retail advertisers wondering whether Bing Shopping is worth the operational overhead of maintaining a separate feed and campaign structure, the answer depends on category and margin. In competitive retail categories where Google Shopping CPCs are high, Bing Shopping can deliver meaningful volume at lower cost. In categories where Bing’s audience skew doesn’t match the buyer profile, the incremental volume may not justify the management overhead.

The growth hacking framing sometimes applied to channel expansion, the idea that finding an underused channel is a shortcut to growth, is mostly misleading. Semrush’s breakdown of growth hacking examples illustrates why the channels themselves aren’t the advantage. The advantage is the quality of execution within them. Bing is no different. The opportunity is real, but it requires the same rigour you’d apply to any other paid channel.

The Case for Taking Bing Seriously in 2025 and Beyond

Microsoft has been investing heavily in AI-powered search through Copilot, its integration of GPT-4 into Bing search results. This is changing the search experience on Bing in ways that are still evolving. Sponsored placements are appearing within AI-generated responses, and the format of how ads appear alongside conversational answers is developing rapidly. This is an area worth monitoring closely, because the early stages of a format shift tend to reward advertisers who engage early before competition drives up costs.

The broader trend toward AI-assisted search, across both Google and Microsoft, is going to change the economics of search advertising in ways that aren’t fully predictable yet. What’s clear is that Microsoft has positioned Bing at the centre of its AI strategy in a way that gives the platform more strategic importance than its current market share reflects. The advertisers who build operational familiarity with Microsoft Advertising now will be better placed to adapt as the format evolves.

I’m not suggesting Bing should replace Google in your media plan. That would be the wrong conclusion. I am suggesting that treating it as an afterthought is a habit worth examining. The audience is real, the targeting capabilities are distinctive, the costs are lower, and the competition is thinner. For the right category and the right buyer profile, those are meaningful commercial advantages that compound over time if you act on them.

The same rigour that makes BCG’s analysis of financial services go-to-market strategy useful applies here: understanding where your audience actually is, and showing up there with something relevant, beats following the crowd to where the audience used to be.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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