Microsoft Advertising is Microsoft’s pay-per-click platform for placing ads on the Bing search engine and its partner network. It works much like Google Ads: you bid on keywords, write ads, set budgets and pay when someone clicks. Until 2019 it was called Bing Ads, and many people still use that name.
How Microsoft Advertising works
Search ads appear on Bing results and, through syndication, on partner search engines. At the time of writing (October 2026) those partners include Yahoo, AOL and DuckDuckGo, so one campaign reaches searches on several engines. Because Bing is the default search engine in the Edge browser and in Windows search, a good share of its traffic comes from office and home desktops where people have never changed the setting.
Beyond search, the platform offers Shopping campaigns fed by a Microsoft Merchant Center product feed, Performance Max, and the Microsoft Audience Network of display and native placements across sites such as MSN and Outlook. At the time of writing, ads can also appear inside Microsoft Copilot answers, though the formats there are still changing.
Two features set it apart. First, you can import campaigns directly from Google Ads, including keywords, ads, bids, budgets and extensions, and schedule the import to repeat. Second, you can target or adjust bids by LinkedIn profile data: company, industry and job function. For a B2B supplier that wants to reach finance directors at manufacturers, that is a level of targeting Google Search does not offer.
Tracking runs through the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag, Microsoft’s equivalent of the Google tag. With auto-tagging switched on, every ad click carries an MSCLKID, a click identifier that lets conversions be matched back to the click, and which your analytics needs to keep intact through any redirects.
Why it matters
Bing’s share of UK searches is much smaller than Google’s, so it rarely replaces Google Ads. If you want a current figure, check a named source such as Statcounter rather than relying on a number you heard at a conference. The point is that the audience it does reach is often worth having: competition in many sectors is thinner than on Google, which can mean cheaper clicks, though this varies by industry and is worth testing in your own account rather than assuming.
For businesses already profitable on Google, Microsoft Advertising is often the most straightforward way to add extra enquiries, because the keywords, ads and landing pages already exist. At the time of writing, Microsoft also expects consent signals from your cookie banner to be passed through UET consent mode for UK visitors, so tracking needs the same care as on Google.
Common mistakes
- Importing a Google Ads account and never checking it again. Imports bring settings across that may not suit Bing, and scheduled imports can overwrite changes you made in Microsoft Advertising.
- Leaving location targeting on the default that includes people interested in, but not in, your area, the same trap as presence or interest targeting on Google.
- Not checking whether a search campaign is also serving on the Audience Network when you only meant to run search.
- Missing the UET tag, or installing it without consent mode, so conversions are absent or collected without valid consent.
- Stripping the MSCLKID from URLs with redirects or plugins, which breaks conversion matching.
- Copying Google bids across unchanged and judging the platform on the first few weeks of low volume.
How to act on it
If Google Ads is working for you, run a controlled test: import your best search campaigns, then review location settings, network distribution, bids and budgets before going live. Install the UET tag through your tag manager with consent mode connected to your cookie banner, define conversion goals, and verify your site in Bing Webmaster Tools while you are about it, which helps with organic Bing visibility too.
Give the test enough time to collect meaningful data, often a couple of months for a smaller business, then compare cost per lead or sale with Google on the same definitions. If you sell to other businesses, try LinkedIn profile bid adjustments early, because that is where the platform most clearly offers something Google does not. I can add Microsoft Advertising to an existing account as part of PPC management.