Microsoft Advertising: The Case for Running It Alongside Google

Microsoft Advertising reaches audiences that Google misses, at costs that Google rarely matches, through placements that most performance teams underutilise. If your paid search programme runs exclusively on Google, you are not running a complete programme. You are running a partial one and calling it finished.

That is not a criticism of Google. It is a description of a common gap. Microsoft Advertising, formerly Bing Ads, operates across Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and the Microsoft Audience Network. The combined reach is smaller than Google’s, but the audience composition, cost dynamics, and competitive intensity are different enough to matter commercially.

Why Most Teams Underinvest in Microsoft Advertising

When I was running iProspect UK, we had clients who were spending eight figures annually on Google and had never run a single pound through Microsoft Advertising. The reason was never strategic. It was inertia dressed up as prioritisation. Google delivered volume, so Google got the budget, the attention, and the optimisation hours. Microsoft sat on the shelf.

That pattern is more common than most agencies admit. Performance teams are stretched, and the path of least resistance is to double down on what already works rather than extend into a platform that requires a separate setup, separate reporting, and a separate conversation with the client about why the numbers look different.

The irony is that the operational barrier is lower than it has ever been. Microsoft’s Google Import tool allows you to pull campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ad copy directly from Google Ads into Microsoft Advertising in minutes. There is no rebuild from scratch. There is no significant time investment. The main thing standing between most advertisers and an active Microsoft Advertising programme is the decision to start.

The question worth asking is not whether Microsoft Advertising is worth running. For most advertisers, it is. The question is how to run it well, and how to integrate it with the rest of your performance programme so that the incremental spend delivers incremental return rather than just incremental complexity.

If you are building or reviewing a broader conversion programme, the work covered in The Marketing Juice’s CRO and Testing hub provides useful context for how paid media and on-site performance interact. The two are more connected than most teams treat them.

What the Microsoft Advertising Audience Actually Looks Like

Platform audience data should always be treated with some scepticism. Platforms have an interest in presenting their audience in the most flattering light. That said, the Microsoft Advertising audience composition is well enough documented across independent sources to be taken seriously.

Bing users skew older than Google users. They are more likely to be in professional roles, more likely to be homeowners, and more likely to be in higher income brackets. A meaningful proportion of Bing searches happen on Windows devices in corporate environments where Bing is the default browser search engine and where IT policy has not been changed. That is not a glamorous acquisition story, but it is a commercially relevant one.

For B2B advertisers, this matters. When I was working with financial services and professional services clients, we consistently found that Microsoft Advertising delivered a higher proportion of business-oriented queries than Google for the same keyword sets. Not dramatically higher, but enough to move conversion rates in the right direction. The audience was closer to the buyer profile.

For B2C advertisers in considered-purchase categories, the older, higher-income skew can also be an advantage. Travel, home improvement, financial products, and automotive tend to perform well on Microsoft because the audience has both the intent and the means to convert.

The categories where Microsoft Advertising tends to underperform relative to Google are those where younger audiences dominate, where mobile-first behaviour is central, or where brand awareness and discovery are more important than intent capture. Fashion, gaming, and social-native products are examples. Not impossible to make work, but harder to justify as a priority.

The CPC Differential and What It Means in Practice

Microsoft Advertising CPCs are generally lower than Google for comparable keyword sets. The gap varies by category and by how competitive the keyword is on each platform, but it is consistent enough to be a genuine structural advantage rather than a statistical anomaly.

Lower CPCs do not automatically mean better performance. If the conversion rate on Microsoft is significantly lower than on Google, the cost-per-acquisition can end up higher even with cheaper clicks. This is where many teams make a mistake. They import their Google campaigns, see the lower CPCs, and assume the economics are better. They may be. But you need to check the conversion data independently before drawing that conclusion.

Conversion rates can differ between platforms for reasons that have nothing to do with ad quality. Audience composition, device mix, and search intent signals all vary. A keyword that drives high-intent, desktop-based searches on Bing may behave differently than the same keyword on Google, where the traffic mix includes more mobile and more top-of-funnel behaviour.

The right way to assess Microsoft Advertising economics is to run a clean comparison over a meaningful time period, with consistent tracking, and to look at cost-per-acquisition rather than CPC in isolation. If the CPA is lower than Google, you have a genuine efficiency gain. If it is higher, you need to understand why before scaling spend.

Page speed is one factor that affects conversion rates across both platforms and is often overlooked in cross-platform analysis. Semrush’s breakdown of page speed and its commercial impact is worth reading if you are trying to diagnose why conversion rates differ between traffic sources. Slow pages affect all traffic, but they can have a disproportionate effect on audiences that are less familiar with your brand and less motivated to wait.

LinkedIn Profile Targeting: The Capability Most B2B Teams Miss

Microsoft owns LinkedIn. That ownership has produced one genuinely differentiated advertising capability: LinkedIn Profile Targeting within Microsoft Advertising. It allows you to layer LinkedIn audience data, including job title, industry, company size, and seniority, onto your search campaigns.

This is not available on Google. It is a meaningful structural advantage for B2B advertisers who want to combine search intent with professional audience segmentation. You can bid more aggressively on searches from senior decision-makers in specific industries, and bid less on searches from audiences that are less likely to convert.

I have seen this used well and I have seen it used poorly. Used well, it tightens the audience around a specific buyer profile and improves conversion rates without reducing volume significantly. Used poorly, it becomes an exercise in over-segmentation, where the audience is so narrowly defined that the campaign does not have enough data to optimise and performance degrades.

The practical guidance is to use LinkedIn Profile Targeting as a bid modifier rather than a hard exclusion filter. Increase bids for the audience segments that match your buyer profile. Do not exclude everyone else. You will still capture relevant searches from people whose LinkedIn data does not match your ideal profile, and you will maintain enough volume for the algorithm to work with.

For B2B advertisers running account-based marketing programmes, the combination of keyword targeting and LinkedIn audience data creates a search channel that is more precise than anything available on Google. It is not a replacement for LinkedIn Ads, but it is a complement to them that most teams are not using.

How to Structure a Microsoft Advertising Programme That Actually Works

The temptation when starting on Microsoft Advertising is to treat it as a mirror of your Google programme. Import everything, set a budget, and wait. That approach will produce results, but it will not produce the best results. Microsoft is a different platform with different audience dynamics, different auction mechanics, and different optimisation levers.

Start with Google Import as the foundation, not the finished product. Import your best-performing Google campaigns, the ones with proven conversion data and clear commercial intent. Do not import everything. Importing underperforming Google campaigns into Microsoft will give you underperforming Microsoft campaigns with less data to diagnose them.

Once the campaigns are running, review the search term reports independently. Microsoft will surface different query variations than Google for the same keywords. Some of those variations will be relevant and worth bidding on directly. Others will be irrelevant and worth adding as negatives. The negative keyword lists you have built on Google are a starting point, but they will not be complete for Microsoft.

Bidding strategy is worth reviewing separately. Microsoft’s automated bidding works differently from Google’s Smart Bidding, and the data requirements for automated strategies to function well are different. If your Microsoft campaigns have lower volume than your Google campaigns, which they likely will initially, you may find that manual bidding or a simpler automated strategy performs better than the most sophisticated options.

Audience targeting deserves its own review. Microsoft offers remarketing, in-market audiences, and custom audiences in addition to the LinkedIn Profile Targeting discussed above. These can be applied as bid modifiers across search campaigns. The in-market audience segments are worth testing, particularly for categories where purchase intent is high and where reaching people close to a buying decision is more valuable than reaching people in early research.

Testing methodology matters here too. If you are running A/B tests across ad copy or landing pages, make sure you are running them with enough volume to reach statistical significance. Optimizely’s work on interaction effects in A/B and multivariate testing is useful background for understanding how to structure tests that produce reliable conclusions rather than false positives.

Landing Page Performance Across Platforms: A Common Blind Spot

One of the most consistent findings when I have reviewed cross-platform performance programmes is that landing page analysis is done at the account level rather than the traffic source level. Teams look at conversion rates per page, per campaign, or per ad group, but they do not routinely segment that data by platform.

This matters because the same landing page can convert differently across Google and Microsoft, not because the page has changed, but because the audience arriving at it is different. An audience that skews older and more professional may respond differently to certain design patterns, value propositions, or calls to action than a broader Google audience.

If your Microsoft Advertising conversion rates are lower than your Google rates, the first place to look is not the ads. It is the landing pages. Are they loading quickly enough? Are they optimised for the device mix coming from Microsoft, which tends to be more desktop-heavy? Is the message on the page aligned with the search intent driving the clicks?

Bounce rate is a useful diagnostic signal here, though it requires careful interpretation. A high bounce rate on a landing page receiving Microsoft traffic could indicate poor message alignment, slow load times, or simply that the audience is more selective. Moz’s explanation of what bounce rate actually measures is a good reference point for avoiding the most common misinterpretations of this metric. And Hotjar’s guidance on diagnosing and fixing high bounce rates offers practical steps for investigation once you have identified a problem.

The broader point is that paid media performance and on-site performance are not separate problems. They are connected. A well-structured Microsoft Advertising programme will drive qualified traffic to your site. What happens to that traffic after the click is a conversion problem, and it deserves the same analytical attention as the ad performance upstream of it.

For a more complete picture of how paid media and conversion rate optimisation interact across the full funnel, the CRO and Testing hub at The Marketing Juice covers the analytical and testing frameworks that make this kind of cross-channel analysis actionable.

Reporting and Attribution: Getting the Numbers Right

Attribution is where most cross-platform performance programmes get messy. Google Analytics, or GA4, will attribute conversions according to its own model. Microsoft Advertising will attribute conversions according to its own tracking. The two will not agree, and if you try to reconcile them directly, you will tie yourself in knots.

The practical approach is to decide on a single source of truth for cross-channel reporting and use platform-level data for within-platform optimisation. GA4 or a third-party attribution tool gives you a consistent view of how channels contribute to conversions across the full customer experience. Microsoft Advertising’s native reporting gives you the granular campaign, ad group, and keyword data you need to make optimisation decisions within the platform.

The numbers will differ. That is expected. What you are looking for is directional consistency. If GA4 shows Microsoft Advertising contributing meaningfully to conversions and the Microsoft platform data shows a reasonable CPA, the programme is working. If GA4 shows minimal contribution and the platform data shows a low CPA, there may be a tracking gap or an attribution model mismatch that needs investigating.

One thing I have learned over twenty years of managing ad spend across multiple platforms is that the instinct to chase perfect attribution is usually counterproductive. You will never get a perfectly clean picture of how each channel contributes to each conversion. What you need is a consistent measurement framework that is good enough to make resource allocation decisions with reasonable confidence. Honest approximation beats false precision every time.

Microsoft Advertising does offer its own multi-touch attribution reporting, which is worth reviewing. It shows how Microsoft touchpoints interact with other channels in the path to conversion. This is useful for making the case for Microsoft’s contribution when it is not the last click before a conversion, which is often the case for a channel that captures earlier-stage intent or reaches audiences who convert through other channels later.

When Microsoft Advertising Is Not the Right Priority

Not every advertiser should prioritise Microsoft Advertising. There are situations where the incremental return does not justify the incremental management overhead, even with Google Import reducing the setup time.

If your Google Ads programme is not yet optimised, and by that I mean if you are still working through fundamental issues with keyword strategy, ad copy quality, landing page alignment, or conversion tracking, then adding Microsoft Advertising will compound those problems rather than solve them. Fix the foundation before extending the structure.

If your budget is genuinely constrained and you are having to choose between scaling proven Google campaigns and starting on Microsoft, the proven campaigns usually win. Microsoft Advertising is an extension of a working programme, not a substitute for one. The case for Microsoft gets stronger as your Google programme matures and as you have budget to allocate beyond your most efficient Google spend.

If your category is one where Microsoft’s audience composition is a poor fit, the economics will not work regardless of how well you manage the campaigns. Test it, measure it honestly, and make the call based on the data rather than on the assumption that more channels always means better performance. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it just means more complexity.

The innovation trap I have seen in agency pitches applies here too. Clients sometimes want to run Microsoft Advertising because it sounds like a smart, sophisticated move, not because they have a clear commercial rationale for it. That is the wrong reason. The right reason is that the audience is there, the economics work, and you have the capacity to manage it properly. Start with the business problem, not the platform.

Making the Case Internally for Microsoft Advertising Budget

If you are a performance marketer trying to get internal sign-off for Microsoft Advertising budget, the conversation needs to be framed around incremental return, not platform diversification. “We should be on more channels” is not a business case. “We can reach an additional qualified audience at a lower cost-per-acquisition than our current Google spend” is a business case.

The strongest version of this argument uses data from a small test. Run a limited Microsoft Advertising programme for four to six weeks with a modest budget. Track conversions properly. Calculate the CPA. Compare it to your Google CPA for the same campaign types. If the economics are favourable, you have a data-driven case for scaling. If they are not, you have learned something useful and saved the business from a larger misallocation.

The test-and-prove approach is slower than asking for a large budget upfront, but it is more likely to succeed and more likely to produce a programme that is properly resourced and properly managed. Budget that is won through a clear commercial argument is budget that stays when performance marketing comes under scrutiny. Budget that is won through enthusiasm tends to disappear when results are mixed.

CRO thinking applies here too. The landing pages and conversion flows that your Microsoft traffic will hit need to be in good shape before you scale spend. There is no point driving cheaper clicks to a broken funnel. The Moz Whiteboard Friday on common CRO misconceptions is worth reviewing if you are making the case for combined paid media and conversion investment, as it addresses some of the assumptions that can undermine both programmes.

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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