How to Do Microsoft Advertising: A Friendly Bing Ads Guide

Here’s how to do Microsoft Advertising in a nutshell: create a free account at ads.microsoft.com, import your existing Google Ads campaigns (or build search campaigns from scratch), review every imported bid, budget, negative keyword, and tracking template, install the UET tag so conversions actually get counted, start with a modest daily budget, and compare the results against your Google data after a few weeks. The platform works much like Google Ads, so if you’ve run search campaigns before, you already know most of the mechanics — you’re mostly learning what’s different, and the differences are genuinely interesting.

Okay, let’s be honest about something first: most advertisers never even open a Microsoft Advertising account. They set up Google Ads, spend their whole budget there, and never ask whether a chunk of their audience is searching somewhere else. That’s exactly why learning how to do Microsoft advertising can be such a quiet advantage — fewer advertisers competing for the same searches often means more breathing room for yours. Not always. Not by some magic percentage. But often enough that it’s worth a real test, and I’m going to walk you through that test step by step.

What is Microsoft Advertising, and where do your ads actually show up?

Microsoft Advertising — which many people still call Bing Ads, its old name — is Microsoft’s paid advertising platform. At its core it’s a search advertising system: you bid on keywords, and your text ads appear when people search for those terms. If you’ve ever built a Google Ads search campaign, the model will feel instantly familiar — keywords, match types, ad groups, quality-based ad ranking, pay-per-click billing.

The part people underestimate is the reach. Your ads don’t just run on Bing.com. Depending on your settings, they can appear across:

• Bing search results — the flagship placement, on desktop and mobile.
• Microsoft Edge and Windows surfaces — Edge is the default browser on Windows, and its default search engine is Bing, which quietly funnels an enormous number of searches into this network. Think of everyone at work on a company laptop who never changed the defaults.
• Yahoo search — Microsoft powers paid search results for Yahoo through a long-running partnership.
• Syndicated search partners — a network of partner sites that show Microsoft search ads. You can see partner performance in reports and exclude low-quality partners if needed.
• Copilot and AI experiences — Microsoft has been weaving advertising into Copilot and other AI-assisted surfaces. This area is changing quickly, so verify in your own account and Microsoft’s current documentation exactly which AI placements exist and how much control you have over them, rather than trusting any blog post — including this one — to be current forever.

One mindset shift that helps: you’re not advertising to “Bing users” as some separate species. You’re advertising to regular people in the moments they happen to search through a Microsoft surface — often at work, often on a desktop, often because it was the default and the results were good enough.

Why should you consider Microsoft Advertising? (The honest version)

Here’s the part nobody tells you: the honest case for Microsoft Advertising isn’t that it’s secretly better than Google Ads. It’s that it’s additional — and often less crowded.

The honest pros:

• Often less competition. Fewer advertisers bid on Microsoft’s network, which often translates into less expensive clicks for the same keywords. I won’t give you a fabricated “CPCs are X% cheaper” number, because those blog statistics are made up more often than not and they vary wildly by industry, keyword, and season. The truthful statement is: it’s often less competitive, and your own campaign data — not anyone’s percentage — decides what that’s worth for you.
• A qualitatively different audience mix. Because so much Microsoft search traffic comes through Windows and Edge defaults, the audience tends to skew toward desktop usage, workplace machines, and professional contexts. Describe it to yourself that way — a tendency, not a statistic — and resist any article that hands you precise demographic percentages without a source.
• Low setup cost if you already run Google Ads. The import tool means your existing campaigns can be live on Microsoft in an afternoon.
• LinkedIn profile targeting. A genuinely unique option we’ll cover below.

The honest cons:

• Smaller search volume. Google handles far more searches. Microsoft Advertising will almost never replace your Google budget — it extends it. If your keywords are niche, some may get very little traffic here.
• Fewer advertisers also means fewer benchmarks. You’ll find less community wisdom, fewer case studies, and you’ll have to rely more on your own testing.
• Feature lag. Microsoft often follows Google’s feature roadmap with a delay, and some features behave slightly differently even when they share a name. Always verify in the current interface.

The sensible posture: treat Microsoft Advertising as the second search channel you add once your Google Ads campaigns are working, as part of a broader strategy — if you want the bigger picture of channels and how paid search fits into it, my guide on how to do search engine marketing walks through the whole landscape.

How do you set up a Microsoft Advertising account?

Setup is refreshingly quick. Here’s the path:

• Step 1: Create your account. Go to ads.microsoft.com and sign up with a Microsoft account (a work email works fine). You’ll set your business name, time zone, and currency — choose carefully, because currency and time zone are hard or impossible to change later.
• Step 2: Choose your starting point. During onboarding, Microsoft will offer to import from Google Ads right away. If you have Google campaigns, this is usually the right call — we’ll cover the import (and its traps) in the next section. If not, choose to build a campaign from scratch; you can keep it paused while you finish setup.
• Step 3: Set up billing. You can typically choose postpay (billed after spend accrues) or prepay (fund the account up front), depending on your country. Add your payment details and check whether any tax or business-verification steps apply in your region.
• Step 4: Install the UET tag before you spend. I’m begging you — don’t skip ahead to launching ads with no conversion tracking. We’ll set up the Universal Event Tracking tag properly a few sections down, but the order matters: tracking first, money second.
• Step 5: Review account-level settings. Look at ad schedule defaults, location settings, and whether your campaigns are opted into partner networks. The defaults are usually broad; you want them deliberate.

One more small kindness to your future self: set up a structure that mirrors your Google Ads account where it makes sense. Matching campaign names and ad group structures makes side-by-side comparison so much easier later.

How do you import campaigns from Google Ads — and what should you review after?

This is the feature that makes Microsoft Advertising almost rude to ignore. The import tool connects to your Google Ads account and copies over campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, and many settings. You can run it once or schedule recurring imports that keep Microsoft synced with changes you make in Google.

How to run an import:

• In Microsoft Advertising, find the Import option (the interface moves things around occasionally, so look for “Import” in the main navigation or account menu).
• Sign in to the Google account that has access to your Google Ads account and authorize the connection.
• Choose which campaigns to import — I’d suggest starting with your proven winners, not everything.
• Review the import options: you can adjust bids and budgets during import, choose what to update on recurring imports, and decide how pauses and removals sync.
• Run it, then read the import log carefully. It tells you what imported cleanly, what was skipped, and what changed.

Now, the part that separates a tidy launch from a quiet money leak: imports do not map 1:1. Here’s what to review immediately after every import:

• Bids and budgets. Your Google bids were tuned for Google’s auction. Microsoft’s auction is different — often less competitive — so imported bids may be higher than needed, and smart bidding strategies need fresh conversion data here before they can work well. Many advertisers start imported campaigns with manual or enhanced bidding and modest budgets, then loosen up as data accumulates.
• Negative keywords. Confirm your negative lists came through and are attached at the right levels. Also note that match type behavior for negatives can differ subtly between platforms — verify how Microsoft currently handles negative match types instead of assuming Google’s rules.
• Tracking templates and URL parameters. This is the sneakiest one. Auto-tagging parameters, UTM values, and tracking templates built for Google (think ValueTrack parameters) may not translate. If your URLs carry gclid-dependent logic or Google-specific parameters, clicks from Microsoft can end up misattributed or broken. Update your tracking templates for Microsoft’s parameters and tag Microsoft traffic distinctly in your analytics.
• Unsupported features. Some Google features, campaign types, or asset formats don’t exist on Microsoft or behave differently. The import log flags most of these — read it rather than skimming it.
• Location and language targeting. Verify your geographic settings imported the way you intended, especially radius targets and location options. If you lean on location strategy, the same thinking from my guide to geographic targeting in Google Ads applies here — the mechanics are similar, but double-check every imported geo setting.
• Ad copy references. If any ad says “Google” anywhere (it happens!), or references a promotion that’s ended, fix it before enabling.

I promise this review gets faster every time. The first one might take an hour; after that, it’s a fifteen-minute ritual.

How do keywords and match types work in Microsoft Advertising?

Good news: if you understand Google’s keyword model, you understand most of Microsoft’s. You bid on keywords in three match types — exact, phrase, and broad — and like Google, Microsoft has loosened how strictly match types are interpreted over the years, with close variants and intent matching playing a bigger role than the old literal rules. Because this is an area both platforms keep adjusting, verify current match type behavior in Microsoft’s documentation when you build out your lists.

A few practical notes that matter on this platform specifically:

• Search terms reports are your best friend. With intent-based matching, the keyword you bought and the search you matched can drift apart. Review the search terms report weekly at first, add negatives generously, and let real queries teach you the local vocabulary of Microsoft’s audience.
• Volume expectations should shrink. A keyword that gets steady traffic on Google may trickle here. That’s normal. Give campaigns longer evaluation windows before judging them.
• Keyword research can start from your Google data. Your proven Google converters are the obvious seed list. Microsoft also has its own keyword planning tools inside the platform for estimating traffic on its network.
• Watch your competitors here too. Because fewer advertisers bother with Microsoft, the competitive landscape for your keywords can look totally different than on Google — sometimes a dominant Google competitor is simply absent. A structured look at who’s bidding on what, like I describe in my walkthrough of PPC competitor analysis, is worth repeating separately for Microsoft.

What ad formats and assets should you use?

The workhorse is the responsive search ad — you supply multiple headlines and descriptions, and the system assembles combinations, mirroring Google’s approach. Write headlines that work in any order, front-load your value, and include your keyword naturally in at least a couple of headlines.

Beyond the core text ad, look at:

• Ad assets (extensions): sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, call assets, location assets, price and promotion assets. These expand your ad’s footprint and are just as underused here as everywhere else. Add every asset type that honestly fits your business.
• Shopping campaigns: if you sell products, Microsoft Shopping campaigns run off a product feed through Microsoft Merchant Center, analogous to Google’s shopping setup.
• Audience ads and automated campaign types: Microsoft offers native-style audience ads across its properties and has been rolling out more automated, multi-surface campaign types. These evolve quickly — verify what’s currently available for your market and start with search before expanding.

One truth that never changes across platforms: your ads must be honest. No fake urgency, no claims you can’t support, no promising outcomes you don’t control. That’s both Microsoft policy and just… how you build a brand people trust. Review Microsoft Advertising’s policies before launch, because disapprovals delay everything.

How does LinkedIn profile targeting work in Microsoft Advertising?

Here’s the genuinely unique one. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising lets you target — or more precisely, apply bid adjustments for — audiences based on LinkedIn profile dimensions: company, industry, and job function.

For B2B advertisers, this is quietly wonderful. You can raise bids when the searcher’s LinkedIn profile matches your ideal customer — say, people who work in healthcare, or in marketing roles, or at specific companies on your target account list. Google has nothing equivalent for search campaigns.

A few honest caveats so you use it well:

• It’s primarily a bid adjustment, not a hard filter, for search campaigns. You’re telling the system “pay more for these people,” not “show ads only to these people” — check the current capabilities in your account, as what’s adjustable versus excludable has evolved.
• Coverage is partial. Not every searcher can be matched to a LinkedIn profile, so treat this as enrichment on top of solid keyword targeting, not a replacement for it.
• Be privacy-aware and tasteful. This targeting uses professional profile dimensions in aggregate — you never see individual identities, and you shouldn’t try to get clever about narrowing audiences down to tiny, identifiable groups. Target respectfully, write ads you’d be comfortable explaining, and follow both Microsoft’s policies and the privacy regulations that apply to you.

How should you handle budgets and bidding?

Start smaller than you think you need to, because this channel’s job at first is to generate evidence, not volume.

• Budget: a sensible starting point is a daily budget you could comfortably spend for a month or two without stress, concentrated on your best-performing imported campaigns rather than spread thin across everything. Microsoft’s smaller volume means each campaign may take longer to collect meaningful data — plan your patience accordingly.
• Bidding strategies: Microsoft offers manual CPC, enhanced CPC, and automated strategies like maximize clicks, maximize conversions, and target CPA or ROAS — with availability varying by campaign type, so verify what’s offered in your account. The practical rule: automated strategies need conversion data to learn from. Fresh accounts with zero conversion history often do better starting on manual or enhanced bidding, then graduating to automated strategies once the UET tag has recorded a steady stream of conversions.
• Bid adjustments: device, location, ad schedule, demographic, and the LinkedIn profile dimensions above. Set these from data, not vibes — run flat for a few weeks, then adjust based on what your reports actually show.
• No guarantees, ever. Any guide that promises a specific return from these settings is selling you something. Budgets and bids are hypotheses; your reports are the verdict.

How do you track conversions with the UET tag?

UET — Universal Event Tracking — is Microsoft’s version of a conversion and remarketing tag, and it’s non-negotiable. Without it you’re flying blind.

• Step 1: Create the tag. In Microsoft Advertising, generate your UET tag. You get a snippet of JavaScript tied to your account.
• Step 2: Install it on every page. Add it sitewide — directly in your site template, or through a tag manager, which is the tidiest option because it also lets you manage consent behavior in one place. Many website platforms also have native fields or plugins for UET.
• Step 3: Define conversion goals. A destination URL goal (like a thank-you page), an event goal (button clicks, form submits), purchase goals with revenue values if you’re ecommerce. Define what a conversion means before you spend, so day one data is clean.
• Step 4: Verify it fires. Use Microsoft’s UET tag helper browser extension or your tag manager’s preview mode to confirm the tag loads and goals trigger correctly. Test the actual conversion path, not just the homepage.
• Step 5: Handle consent properly. The UET tag also powers remarketing audiences, which means cookies and tracking consent rules apply. If you serve visitors in regions with consent requirements (GDPR, and a growing list of other privacy laws), your consent banner must gate the tag appropriately, and Microsoft provides consent mode mechanisms — verify the current implementation requirements in their documentation. Respecting consent isn’t just legal hygiene; it’s basic respect for the people you’re hoping to turn into customers.

With UET live, you can also build remarketing lists — past visitors, cart abandoners, converters to exclude — and layer them onto search campaigns. Same privacy posture applies: useful, powerful, and to be used transparently.

How do you measure Microsoft Advertising and compare it to Google honestly?

This is where I want to save you from the most common self-deception in PPC: comparing platforms on the wrong numbers, or trusting someone else’s comparison instead of running your own.

Here’s a clean comparison method:

• Compare the same campaigns. Since you imported from Google, you have near-identical campaigns on both platforms. That’s a beautiful natural experiment — use it.
• Compare on business metrics, not vanity metrics. Cost per conversion and return on ad spend, measured over the same date range, matter. Raw click volume will favor Google; that tells you about market size, not efficiency.
• Give Microsoft a fair window. Lower volume means slower statistical signal. Judging a Microsoft campaign on one week of data is like judging a slow cooker after ten minutes.
• Check assisted value in analytics. Look at how Microsoft-sourced visitors behave on site — bounce, depth, assisted conversions — tagged distinctly so they don’t blur into other search traffic.
• Then allocate budget by evidence. If Microsoft delivers conversions at a better cost, shift more budget until the numbers say stop. If it doesn’t, scale it back without guilt. Either answer is a win, because now you know — and that knowledge came from your data, not from a blog’s invented percentage.

What are the most common Microsoft Advertising mistakes?

• Importing and walking away. The set-and-forget import is the classic failure mode. Unreviewed bids, broken tracking templates, and missing negatives quietly burn budget.
• Judging it by Google-sized expectations. Lower volume isn’t failure; it’s the shape of the channel. Measure efficiency, not just volume.
• Launching without UET. No tag, no truth. Every day of untracked spend is data you paid for and threw away.
• Ignoring the search partner settings. Partner traffic quality varies. Check performance by network in your reports and exclude what underperforms.
• Skipping the search terms report. Looser match behavior means your negatives list should grow weekly, especially in the first month.
• Copy-pasting Google bid strategies onto day-one campaigns. Automated bidding without local conversion history tends to flail. Earn your automation with data first.
• Believing invented statistics. If a blog tells you Microsoft clicks are exactly some percent cheaper, be suspicious — the honest version is “often less competitive, but your data decides.”

What’s a simple starter plan for Microsoft Advertising?

Here’s a plan you could genuinely start this week:

• Day 1: Create the account. Set currency, time zone, and billing. Generate the UET tag and install it sitewide with proper consent handling.
• Day 2: Define conversion goals and verify the tag fires on your real conversion paths.
• Day 3: Import your top 2-3 proven Google Ads campaigns. Keep them paused.
• Day 4: Work through the import-review checklist below. Fix everything before enabling.
• Day 5: Enable campaigns with modest budgets and conservative bids. Add LinkedIn profile bid adjustments if you’re B2B.
• Weekly, for the first month: review search terms and add negatives, check network and device performance, confirm conversions are recording sensibly.
• At 4-8 weeks (or whenever you have enough conversions to be meaningful): run the honest Google-vs-Microsoft comparison on cost per conversion and ROAS, then reallocate budget by evidence.

Your post-import review checklist — run this after every import, initial or recurring:

• Bids: appropriate for a less competitive auction, not blindly copied?
• Budgets: set to your Microsoft test levels, not your Google levels?
• Bidding strategy: manual/enhanced until local conversion data exists?
• Negative keywords: lists present, attached at the right level, match behavior verified?
• Tracking templates and URL parameters: Google-specific parameters replaced, Microsoft traffic tagged distinctly in analytics?
• Location, language, and device targeting: imported as intended?
• Network settings: search partners on or off deliberately?
• Ads: no stale promotions, no “Google” references, all assets imported or rebuilt?
• Import log: skipped and unsupported items reviewed and resolved?
• Conversion goals: firing, and attributed to the right campaigns?

And one clarity note before the pitch you can see coming: SocialBlaze is an organic social media management platform — scheduling, publishing, analytics, and a unified inbox — not an ads manager. It won’t run your Microsoft or Google campaigns, and I’d never pretend otherwise. Where it fits is the other half of your marketing: the organic presence that makes your paid clicks convert better, because people who click an ad and then find an active, credible brand are far easier to win.

FAQ: How to do Microsoft Advertising

Is Microsoft Advertising the same as Bing Ads?

Yes — Bing Ads was the platform’s former name, and it was rebranded to Microsoft Advertising. The name change reflects that ads run well beyond Bing itself: across Edge, Yahoo search, syndicated partners, and Microsoft’s newer AI surfaces like Copilot experiences.

Is Microsoft Advertising cheaper than Google Ads?

Often the auction is less competitive because fewer advertisers participate, and that frequently shows up as lower costs — but there’s no universal percentage, and anyone quoting one precisely is guessing or fabricating. Import your campaigns, run both platforms on the same keywords, and let your own cost-per-conversion data give you the real answer for your business.

Can I import my Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Advertising?

Yes, and it’s the fastest way to launch — the built-in import tool copies campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads, and can run on a recurring schedule. Just remember the import isn’t perfectly 1:1: always review bids, budgets, negative keywords, tracking templates, and the import log before enabling anything.

What is the UET tag and do I really need it?

UET (Universal Event Tracking) is Microsoft’s sitewide tag that records conversions and builds remarketing audiences. You really do need it — without it you can’t measure cost per conversion, automated bidding has nothing to learn from, and you’re spending blind. Install it with proper cookie-consent handling before you spend your first dollar.

What makes LinkedIn profile targeting special?

Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft Advertising can apply bid adjustments based on a searcher’s company, industry, or job function — a capability Google search campaigns don’t have. It’s especially valuable for B2B advertisers, though coverage is partial and it works best layered on top of solid keyword targeting, used with care for privacy and policy.