Microsoft Ads · Bing · Copilot
Import your Google campaigns, add LinkedIn profile targeting Google cannot match, and build the UET tracking that never comes across. Fixed fee from £995 a month, no contract.
No pitch. No obligation. We reply within one business day.
Microsoft Ads is worth roughly 6% of your Google search volume overall and nearer 12% on desktop, at a lower cost per click, with LinkedIn profile data available in the auction. It suits B2B and considered-purchase businesses. Conversion tracking never imports from Google and has to be rebuilt.
Microsoft Ads is not a replacement for Google. It is a smaller, cheaper, older-skewing auction sitting next to it — and for the right business it quietly produces some of the best-value leads in the account.
The honest numbers first. Statcounter put Bing at about 6% of UK search in July 2026 against Google’s 92%, and nearly 11% on desktop, where Bing is Edge’s default and traffic skews to business hours and business machines. Work those back and Microsoft is worth roughly 6% of your Google volume overall, nearer 12% on desktop. Anyone telling you it will double your leads is selling.
What you get in exchange for the smaller volume:
Who it suits. Business-to-business and professional services — finance, insurance, legal, accountancy, private healthcare, recruitment and training. Anything with a considered purchase, a decent ticket value, and a buyer likely to be at a work computer when they start looking.
Who it does not. If your customers are young, mobile-first and impulsive, the audience skew works against you. If the whole market is a panicked mobile search, volume will be thin. And if your Google account is not yet saturated, a second platform splits your budget before the first is finished — the answer there is to spend more on Google, and we will say so.
If you already run Google Ads you do not build Microsoft from scratch. You import. Campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads and most assets copy across in one job, which gets you a structurally correct account in an afternoon.
The import is the easy part. What separates an account that works from one that quietly wastes money is the hour afterwards:
The import can run on a schedule so Microsoft stays in step with Google. Useful, with one trap: a recurring sync overwrites Microsoft-only work. LinkedIn bid layers, Microsoft-specific adjustments, Audience Network campaigns — all flattened unless deliberately excluded. Set up properly it saves hours a month. Set up carelessly it deletes the things that made the account worth running.
This is the one genuinely distinctive thing Microsoft Ads can do. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, you can layer LinkedIn profile data onto search campaigns. No other search platform offers it.
Three dimensions are available:
Be clear about the limits, because most pages selling this get them wrong. Microsoft gives you job function, not job title, and there is no seniority filter, so you cannot separate a director from a graduate. There is no company-size dimension either.
The bigger point: it is bid-only. Targeting an industry does not exclude everyone outside it — your ads still show to other searchers. It changes what you pay when someone matches, nothing more. Anyone promising to restrict your search delivery to a named company list on Microsoft is describing a feature that does not exist.
What makes it worth using is the price of access. LinkedIn’s own platform charges a substantial multiple of search CPCs for the same profile, and here you get it at search cost with search intent on top — someone who fits the profile and has just typed your service into a search bar.
How we run it: a positive bid adjustment on the matched audience, sized by what that profile is genuinely worth to you, reviewed once there are enough conversions to say whether it converts better. Stacking all three dimensions on day one is a fast route to an ad group with almost no matched traffic and nothing to learn from.
UET — Universal Event Tracking — is Microsoft’s site tag, and the part of an account most often broken or missing altogether. Nothing imports it. It has to be built.
Without a working tag and correct goals, automated bidding has nothing to aim at, remarketing audiences cannot be built, and every number in the interface is fiction. So is every recommendation built on it. It is the first thing we check and the first thing we fix.
A build we would sign off includes the base tag on every page rather than only the thank-you page, a separate goal for each meaningful action, enhanced conversions passing hashed first-party data so matching survives cookie loss, and Consent Mode, which is not optional for UK traffic. It also includes Microsoft Clarity connected to the account — session recordings filtered by campaign are free, and explain a poor conversion rate faster than another week of bid adjustments.
For lead generation there is one further step most accounts skip: feeding qualified outcomes back from your CRM, so bidding optimises towards booked work rather than form fills. Without it the platform finds you a large volume of the cheapest, worst leads available and reports it as success. That work is covered on our conversion tracking page.
One reporting rule while both run: never add Google’s conversions to Microsoft’s and call it a total. Both claim the same conversion. Report each separately and take the blended number from one neutral source.
From £995 per month, per platform. Fixed, never a percentage of your ad spend, no contract — so if it stops earning its keep you leave. There is a one-off charge for the tracking build where one is needed. Full detail is on our pricing page.
Jake and Jamie run the account. Not a junior, not an account manager relaying messages, not an outsourced team. Two of us, and we do the work.
The honest caveat on Microsoft. Volume is a fraction of Google’s, so the media budget usually is too, and a fixed fee against a small budget is a large share of it. If Microsoft is only ever going to take a few hundred pounds a month in your market, we will tell you to put that money into Google instead. It earns its place when the audience skew is in your favour, when LinkedIn data lets you bid properly for buyers Google cannot identify, or when Google Search is saturated.
Yes. Microsoft renamed it in April 2019 but it is the same product and the same auction. Ads can appear on Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, across the Audience Network on MSN, Outlook and Edge, and now in Copilot. Most people still say Bing Ads and we know what you mean.
A fraction of Google. Statcounter put Bing at about 6% of UK search in July 2026 against Google’s 92%, rising to nearly 11% on desktop — so roughly 6% of your Google volume overall, nearer 12% on desktop. Business-to-business and desktop-heavy categories index higher. Better to set that expectation now than disappoint you in month two.
Not strictly, but it is almost always the right order. Google has the volume, and the import gives you a proven structure in an afternoon instead of months of testing. Building Microsoft first means learning everything twice on the smaller platform.
They can. Microsoft opts every eligible campaign into Copilot automatically, using the assets you already have — no Copilot campaign to buy, no way to opt out. Two things to check: search ads need a logo asset to qualify, and Copilot Search specifically is tied to AI Max, which you opt into per campaign.
Tell us what you are running on Google today and we will tell you whether Microsoft is worth adding. We’ll come back with a free tracking audit and a straight answer on whether we can help — usually within one business day.