Microsoft Ads vs Google Ads: Is Bing Worth It for UK Businesses?

Meaningfully different, and it is the main reason to run it. Bing is the default in Windows and Edge, so the audience skews towards desktop use, older age brackets and often higher household income. [STAT: confirm source]

In practice that means office workers researching during the working day, people on company machines, and purchases that are considered rather than impulsive. If that describes your customer, the audience difference works in your favour. If your customer is 22 and found you on a phone at 11pm, it does not.

Clicks are usually cheaper, but cheaper clicks and cheaper sales are not the same thing.

Fewer advertisers bid on Microsoft, so auction prices are lower on most keyword sets we look at. [STAT: confirm source] Whether that turns into a lower cost per sale depends on your conversion rate with this audience, which can be higher in B2B and considered purchase sectors and lower in fast moving consumer categories. The only way to know is to run it properly for a few weeks and read the numbers separately from Google.

A small fraction of Google, and that is the real constraint. Microsoft holds a minority share of UK search. [STAT: confirm source]

Practically, that means you should expect to spend a fraction of your Google budget, not a matching one. Budgets often go unspent not because bids are too low but because there simply are not enough searches. It also means data accumulates slowly, so smart bidding takes longer to settle and you need patience before judging performance.

The reach is wider than Bing alone though: Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Copilot and the Microsoft Audience Network all carry these ads, which is what makes the volume worthwhile rather than negligible.

LinkedIn profile targeting, which is unique to Microsoft. You can target or apply bid adjustments by company, industry and job function on search campaigns.

For B2B this is the single strongest argument for the platform. On Google you bid on a keyword and hope the right job title is behind it. On Microsoft you can weight bids towards the industries and job functions you actually sell to, which lifts lead quality rather than just volume.

Microsoft is also placing ads inside Copilot, which matters as more search behaviour moves into AI assistants.

When it costs more in management time than it can return. That is a real scenario and worth being blunt about.

• Your Google account is unprofitable. Fix that first, do not duplicate it.
• Your audience is under 25 or almost entirely mobile, where Bing share is lowest.
• Your keyword set returns very little Microsoft search volume.
• Total ad budget is small enough that splitting it weakens both platforms rather than helping either.
• Nobody has time to maintain a second account, and an unmaintained account drifts.

If two or more of those apply, leave it. We would rather say so than take a fee for running an account that cannot pay for itself.

Run both when Google is profitable and there is volume to find, and treat Google as the testing ground.

Keywords, negatives, ad copy and feed improvements proven on Google can be applied to Microsoft without paying to learn them twice. Bids, audiences and targeting need to be set for the Microsoft auction, not copied. How that is done in practice is on our Microsoft Ads management page, and if you are moving campaigns across yourself, read what breaks when you import Google Ads into Microsoft Ads first. For product catalogues, see Microsoft Ads for ecommerce.