Mention Bing in a marketing meeting and someone makes the joke. Meanwhile the same buyer intent that costs a fortune on Google is clearing at lower prices in an auction most of their competitors never entered.
Google Ads is the most contested advertising marketplace there is. Every competitor you have is in it, bidding on the same queries, and the auction prices accordingly. Microsoft Ads serves the same kind of intent - people typing what they want into a search box - with far fewer advertisers competing for it. The volume is smaller, obviously, though it's concentrated somewhere worth paying attention to.
Corporate desktops default to Edge
Edge ships as the default browser on Windows, Edge defaults to Bing, and a large share of workplace machines never get either setting changed. That puts a meaningful chunk of professional, at-their-desk, during-work-hours searching on Microsoft's network - which is the exact searching B2B advertisers pay a premium to reach on Google. The buyer didn't choose Bing. Their IT department did, and the intent is identical either way.
This shows in where the channel performs for us. It earns its place across plenty of verticals, but B2B is where we see it work hardest and most consistently, and the desktop share on Microsoft's network is noticeably higher there. Those two facts seem related: someone at a work machine during work hours is a different prospect from someone thumbing through a phone on the sofa.
There's also one targeting feature Google has no answer to. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so inside a search campaign you can adjust bids by industry, company, and job function: bid up when the searcher works in your target sector or holds the right role, ease off when they don't. Profile-level bidding against live search intent doesn't exist anywhere else in paid search, and in my experience hardly anybody switches it on.
Judge it on cost per qualified lead
Cheap CPCs are the trap here, because a cheap click isn't an achievement on any platform. Give the channel one job: come in below your Google cost per qualified lead, measured to the same qualification standard. Clear that bar and it earns its place. Miss it, and no amount of "but look at the CPCs" should save it.
Two things worth knowing before you set it up.
Importing your Google structure is the right starting point and keeps setup cheap, but the auction behaves differently once it's running - bids, negatives and settings all need their own attention. Set-and-forget imports are the reason most people conclude Bing doesn't work.
And keep the expectations proportionate. This is an efficiency channel rather than a growth engine. It won't double your lead volume; it'll deliver a tranche of leads more cheaply than Google does, for fairly modest ongoing effort.
The honest caveat is on our side of the invoice. Managing Microsoft Ads properly takes a similar amount of work to Google for a fraction of the spend, so as a percentage of budget the management cost looks disproportionate however you slice it. That's a real consideration at smaller volumes, and it's the reason to judge the whole thing on cost per qualified lead including fees rather than on media cost alone. At the point where the maths stops working, we'd rather say so than keep billing for it.
The setup cost is a rounding error
An account, an import, and a few hours of tuning. We've written up the practical side of account access separately - roles, invites, linking, and the settings that catch people out.
Given how little it costs to find out, running it for a quarter and checking the cost per qualified lead is a cheaper way to settle the argument than continuing to have it.
