Mention Bing to most business owners and you get a smile. It is the search engine that comes with the computer, the one people use by accident before they install Chrome. That reputation is precisely why Microsoft Ads is one of the most overlooked opportunities in paid search, and why the clicks there often cost a fraction of what you pay on Google.
Advertising follows fashion, and fashion follows crowds. Google is where everyone competes, so Google is where prices get bid up. Bing is unfashionable, fewer advertisers bother, and less competition means lower cost per click. The audience is smaller, but for a good number of sectors it is a better audience, not a worse one.
Who is actually on Bing
The Bing audience skews older, more professional, more likely to be on a work desktop, and higher income on average. A lot of that comes down to defaults. Bing is the built-in search on Windows and in Microsoft Edge, and it is the search behind corporate machines across finance, law, healthcare, and the public sector. Plenty of those users never change the default, and plenty of them are exactly the people making buying decisions.
So the picture is not "the people too lazy to install a better browser". For many businesses it is "professionals, at work, on a proper keyboard, with money to spend". That combination converts well, and it converts at a lower cost per click than the same person would on Google.
You can import your Google campaigns in an afternoon
The most common reason people never try Microsoft Ads is the assumed effort of building everything again. You do not have to. Microsoft's import tool pulls your existing Google Ads campaigns across almost wholesale: keywords, ad copy, ad groups, budgets, and structure. You review, tidy the bits that do not translate, set your budgets, and you are live.
It genuinely is an afternoon's work rather than a project. A sensible approach is to import, then trim the budgets down at first so you can see how the same campaigns behave on a different audience before you commit real money. Do not just mirror your Google spend and walk away. Watch which campaigns pull their weight on Bing, because it is rarely a perfect copy of your Google results.
The targeting trick only Microsoft has
Here is the part most people do not know. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft Ads lets you layer LinkedIn profile targeting on top of your search campaigns. You can target or adjust bids by company, by industry, and by job function.
Google has nothing like this. If you sell to, say, finance directors at manufacturing firms, you can lean your bids towards exactly those people while they search. For B2B advertisers that one feature can justify running Microsoft Ads on its own, regardless of the cheaper clicks. It turns a search campaign into something much closer to targeted B2B outreach.
Where it works well
Microsoft Ads tends to earn its place for:
- B2B. The professional, at-work, desktop audience is your buyer, and the LinkedIn targeting is a real edge.
- Finance and legal. Higher-value, considered purchases from an older, more affluent audience that Bing over-indexes on.
- Over-50s markets. Anything aimed at an older demographic, from health products to financial services to home improvements, finds a receptive audience here.
- Anyone already maxed out on Google. If you have hit your ceiling on Google and want more of the same intent-driven traffic at a lower cost, this is the obvious next channel.
Where it does not
It is not a fit for everyone, and it is worth being honest about that.
- Youth and mobile-first brands. If your customers are young and living on their phones, they are not on Bing. The audience simply is not there.
- Very low budgets. Bing's search volume is a fraction of Google's, so if your niche is small to begin with, there may not be enough traffic to make it worth the setup. Volume is the constant trade-off: cheaper clicks, but fewer of them.
- Anything that depends on scale over efficiency. If you need maximum reach more than you need a low cost per click, Google remains the bigger pool.
Worth an afternoon
The honest summary is that Microsoft Ads will not replace Google for most businesses. What it will often do is add a stream of cheaper, high-intent clicks from a professional audience you are currently ignoring, for very little extra effort. For B2B and older, higher-income markets in particular, the maths frequently works out better than Google on a cost-per-conversion basis.
Given the import tool does most of the heavy lifting, it is one of the lowest-risk tests in paid search. When we manage a client's Google Ads, checking whether Microsoft Ads is worth turning on is a quick, standard part of the job rather than a separate project.