Your Google Ads clicks keep getting more expensive. Somebody at a chamber lunch in The Woodlands says, “Have you tried Bing? Nobody advertises there, it’s cheap.” You laugh, because who uses Bing. Then you remember the PC on your own office desk opens Edge every morning.
So, is Bing Ads worth it? For a lot of small businesses, yes, as a small and controlled test. We wouldn’t make it a big bet. Bing handled 9.72% of U.S. searches across devices in October 2026 and 18.8% of desktop searches, per StatCounter. A minority, sure, but real money, and you can copy your Google campaigns over in an afternoon. B2B companies tend to get the most out of it, along with anyone whose customers search from a work computer or whose Google clicks have gotten painfully expensive. If your Google account isn’t profitable yet, skip it for now.
Below are the actual numbers and what changed this year with Copilot and AI Max. We also chased down where the “Bing is 33% cheaper” line comes from (nowhere solid, it turns out), and there’s a decision table plus the setup steps.
How many people actually use Bing in 2026?
More than most owners assume, and fewer than Microsoft’s sales deck implies. It depends a lot on which device you count.
Across desktop, mobile and tablet, StatCounter put October 2026 U.S. search share at Google 85.5%, Bing 9.72%, Yahoo 2.54% and DuckDuckGo 1.74%. On desktop alone, StatCounter’s desktop numbers show a very different split: Google 74.86%, Bing 18.8%, Yahoo 3.98% and DuckDuckGo 1.96%.
Why the gap? Windows PCs ship with Edge, Edge defaults to Bing, and a lot of office computers never get changed. On phones, Google is the default almost everywhere. So Bing’s audience leans toward people sitting at a desk.
Microsoft’s own numbers are bigger, and it’s worth knowing why. Microsoft Advertising’s search page claims 109 million unique U.S. PC users, 6.4 billion monthly PC searches and a 38.1% PC market share. Read the footnote: that’s Comscore data from March 2023, desktop traffic only, and it covers Microsoft’s whole search network. Yahoo, AOL and DuckDuckGo results show Microsoft ads too, so they’re counted in. Not wrong, exactly. It’s a sales pitch resting on three-year-old data.
For a Houston-area business, we assume Microsoft Ads reaches somewhere around a tenth of the search demand Google does. More if your buyers search from work.
Where Microsoft ads show up now: Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Copilot
A Microsoft Ads search campaign can appear on more than bing.com. Microsoft’s search page lists Bing, AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia among the sites that show its search ads, plus syndicated partners. Its audience ads can run across MSN, Edge and Outlook.com.
The newer piece is Copilot, Microsoft’s AI assistant that’s built into Edge, Windows and Bing. Ads now appear inside Copilot answers. According to JumpFly’s breakdown, to be eligible you need to be running certain ad types: responsive search ads, Dynamic Search Ads or Performance Max for search placements, plus product and multimedia ads. Microsoft says Copilot ads are built only from your existing assets rather than newly generated copy. There’s no separate “Copilot campaign” to create; it rides on what you already run.
Then there’s AI Max. On August 19, 2026, Microsoft started rolling AI Max out to all accounts globally, per PPC Land. It’s a toggle at the Search campaign level. Flip it and you get search term matching that reaches past your keyword list (including the longer, chattier queries people type into Bing and Copilot), plus text customization, where Microsoft tests messaging variations based on your ads and website. It also turns on final URL expansion, which sends people to whichever page on your site Microsoft thinks fits best. You can exclude URLs, and you probably should.
Each piece can be switched off. Microsoft’s older Predictive Matching feature is being folded into AI Max’s search term matching, according to a July 2026 help-doc change, with no effective date announced.
On a small test budget, we leave AI Max off for the first month. You want clean search terms from your own keywords before the system starts wandering. Turn it on later as a deliberate experiment, and read the search terms report every week while it runs (bring coffee).
Microsoft Ads vs Google Ads: what’s actually different
The interfaces look almost identical, and that’s on purpose. The differences that matter are underneath.
| Google Ads | Microsoft Ads | |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. search share, all devices (Oct 2026) | 85.5% | 9.72% for Bing, plus partner sites |
| U.S. desktop share (Oct 2026) | 74.86% | 18.8% for Bing |
| Professional targeting | No LinkedIn data | LinkedIn company, industry and job function |
| Broad match negative keywords | Supported | Not supported; imported as phrase match |
| AI answer placements | AI Overviews and AI Mode | Copilot |
| Setup effort if you already run Google | n/a | Import tool copies campaigns, keywords and ads |
| Competition in most local auctions | Heavy | Usually lighter, check your own keywords |
Now about cost. You’ll read everywhere that Bing clicks are “33% cheaper” or “up to 70% cheaper.” We went looking for where those numbers come from. Mostly, they trace back to agency blog posts with no named source, or to studies that are years old. We won’t quote them, and you shouldn’t plan a budget around them.
In practice, fewer advertisers bid in Microsoft’s auctions for local keywords. Clicks are often cheaper, though not always, and volume is much lower. Your own numbers are the ones to trust. Microsoft has its own Keyword Planner; run your top 20 Google keywords through it with Houston-area targeting and compare the suggested bids against your actual Google CPCs. Our Houston Google Ads CPC benchmarks give you the Google side.
LinkedIn profile targeting: the B2B reason to care
This is the feature Google can’t match. Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft Ads lets you layer LinkedIn profile data onto your campaigns. Per Microsoft’s LinkedIn profile targeting page, you can target by:
- Company (up to 1,000 of them in a single ad group or campaign)
- Industry, such as oil and energy, construction, or hospital and health care
- Job function, such as purchasing, engineering or operations
It works in Search, Dynamic Search Ads, Shopping, Audience and (for some accounts) Performance Max campaigns.
The detail people miss is that in search campaigns this works as a bid adjustment. Targeting a company doesn’t exclude everyone else; it lets you bid more when someone from that company searches your keywords. That turns out to be more useful than a filter. Picture an industrial valve distributor in Conroe. When someone searches “api 6d ball valve supplier houston,” you want the click either way, but you’d pay a lot more for it if the searcher works in purchasing at one of the operators along the Energy Corridor or one of the big petrochemical plants on the Ship Channel.
If you sell B2B, we think that signal alone justifies the setup time. Our B2B marketing guide for Houston energy and industrial companies covers the rest of that playbook.
When Microsoft Ads is worth it, and when we’d skip it
This is the decision table we actually use. There’s judgment baked into every row, but it gets most businesses to the right answer.
| Your situation | Our call | Why |
|---|---|---|
| B2B, industrial, professional services | Test it | Buyers search on work PCs, and LinkedIn targeting helps |
| High-CPC local services (law, roofing, HVAC replacement) | Test it | Even small volume can come cheaper than Google’s top-of-page bids |
| Older customers (Medicare, retirement planning, home care) | Test it | Microsoft pitches an older, desktop-heavy audience; verify with your own data |
| Google campaigns limited by budget, not demand | Fix Google first | Spend more where 85% of the searches are |
| Google account not profitable yet | Skip for now | Importing a broken campaign gives you two broken campaigns |
| Emergency, mobile-first searches (locksmith, towing) | Low priority | Those searches happen on phones, where Bing is small |
| Restaurants, quick retail, impulse buys | Usually skip | Maps, social and Google’s local results matter more |
| Under about $1,500 a month on Google | Usually skip | The Microsoft slice would be too small to learn from |
Microsoft has no $1,500 minimum. That line is ours. Below it, a 10% to 15% test is $150 to $225 a month, which in a Houston auction might be 30 clicks, and nobody can read anything into 30 clicks.
A quick word on that “older audience” pitch. Microsoft markets its audience as more affluent and more desktop-based, and desktop share does skew that way. We just haven’t seen independent data we’d stake your budget on. Treat it as a hypothesis and let your own conversion data settle it.
Two Houston examples, worked through
Numbers make this easier. Both of these are hypotheticals with made-up but realistic figures, so swap in your own.
An estate planning attorney in The Woodlands
Say she spends $4,000 a month on Google search and gets about 20 consultation requests, so roughly $200 per lead. Her clients are mostly 55 and older, and a lot of them research from a desktop at home or at the office near Hughes Landing. That’s close to the profile Microsoft pitches. A $600 monthly Microsoft test (15% of Google) that produces three or four consults at $150 to $200 each is a clear keep. If it produces one consult a month for three months straight, it isn’t, and she’s out $1,800, which is a fair price for a real answer.
A two-truck HVAC company in Spring
Now say he spends $2,500 a month on Google, and most of his calls come from phones in July and August when an AC quits at 9 p.m. Emergency searches like that happen on mobile, where Bing’s share is small. He might still test Microsoft for “ac replacement cost” and “new hvac system quote” type keywords, which people often research at a desk, but we’d put his next $375 into Google Local Services Ads or more budget on his best Google campaign first.
Same platform, and we’d give these two owners opposite advice.
How to import Google Ads into Microsoft Ads, step by step
This is the part that makes the test cheap. You don’t rebuild anything. Per Microsoft’s Google Import instructions:
- Create the account at ads.microsoft.com with a business email, and set up billing.
- Install the UET tag (Microsoft’s version of the Google tag). If you use Google Tag Manager, add it there. Create conversion goals that match your Google ones: calls, form submits, booked appointments.
- Go to Import, then Import from Google Ads. Sign in to Google. Choose Customize rather than Quick import so you can pick specific campaigns and associate your UET tag.
- Import only the one or two search campaigns that already make money on Google. Leave the rest behind for now.
- Decide on scheduled imports. Automatic schedules re-sync changes from Google, and Microsoft warns they can reactivate paused campaigns and revert budgets. For a test, we turn the schedule off and manage Microsoft on its own.
- Check what changed on the way in. Bids and budgets below Microsoft’s minimums get raised by default. Broad match negatives become phrase match negatives, so review your negative list.
- Re-check location targeting. Microsoft notes targeting settings differ significantly between platforms, so confirm your radius or zip codes and the location intent options before going live.
- Set a separate budget and launch.
If you have Google’s two-step verification on and the direct import fails, Microsoft suggests an application-specific password or uploading an import file instead.
New to paid search altogether? Start with our small business guide to Google Ads and come back to this once Google works.
What a fair test looks like: budget, time and the numbers to watch
Give it 60 to 90 days and a budget of 10% to 20% of your Google search spend. Shorter than that and the test mostly measures luck, because the volume is low.
What to watch, in this order:
- Search terms, weekly. Microsoft’s matching can be looser than you expect. Add negatives early.
- Conversions. Make sure the UET goals are actually recording before you judge anything, which means making a test call yourself.
- Cost per lead against Google’s. If it’s within about 25% of your Google cost per lead, the channel is earning its keep, because it’s incremental volume.
- Lead quality. Ask every caller how they found you and tag the Microsoft leads in your CRM. Cheap leads that never book aren’t cheap.
- Device and hour reports. If almost everything converts on desktop from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., consider a desktop-focused schedule.
By day 90 you’ll know roughly where you stand. If it’s working, raise the budget gradually. If it’s close, try LinkedIn bid adjustments or AI Max as the next experiment. If it isn’t, turn it off, put the money back into Google, and don’t feel bad about it.
The expensive mistake is a mediocre campaign left running for two years because nobody looked.
Should you hire someone to run it?
Honestly, Microsoft Ads is one of the easier things to do yourself if your Google account is in good shape. The import does most of the work. Budget a couple of hours to set it up and twenty minutes a week to watch it.
Where it gets harder is when the Google account itself has problems, because the import copies them. If you’re not sure your Google campaigns are healthy, fix that first. Our free Ad Spend Leak Check is a 10-minute video showing where your Google or Meta budget is leaking, in your inbox within 48 hours, and it’s a sensible first step before you expand to a second search engine. If you’d rather hand off the whole search program, our search marketing team runs Google and Microsoft campaigns for businesses across The Woodlands and Houston.
Frequently asked questions
Is Bing Ads cheaper than Google Ads?
Often, but not always, and the popular claims of 33% or 70% savings don’t trace back to solid current sources. Fewer advertisers bid in most local Microsoft auctions, so clicks can cost less, but volume is much lower. Run your own top keywords through Microsoft’s Keyword Planner and compare suggested bids with what you pay on Google today.
Can I import my Google Ads campaigns into Microsoft Ads?
Yes. In Microsoft Ads, choose Import, then Import from Google Ads, sign in to Google and pick the campaigns to copy. Bids and budgets below Microsoft’s minimums are raised by default and broad match negatives become phrase match. Recheck location targeting and decide whether to keep scheduled imports on, since they can overwrite changes.
Do Microsoft ads show on Yahoo and DuckDuckGo?
Yes. Microsoft lists Bing, AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia among the sites that show its search ads, along with other syndicated partners. That’s why Microsoft’s reach claims are larger than Bing’s own search share. Check the publisher reports in your account to see which sites your clicks actually came from.
Do Microsoft ads show in Copilot?
Yes. Ads can appear inside Copilot answers, and there is no separate Copilot campaign to build. Eligibility depends on running supported ad types such as responsive search ads, Dynamic Search Ads, Performance Max, and product or multimedia ads. Microsoft says Copilot ads are assembled from your existing assets rather than newly generated copy.
How much should a small business spend on Microsoft Ads?
For a first test, we suggest 10% to 20% of your Google search budget for 60 to 90 days, starting with your best-performing Google campaigns. If you spend less than about $1,500 a month on Google, the Microsoft slice is usually too small to learn from, and the money does more good in Google.
Sean Melton is the founder of First Byte, a digital marketing agency in The Woodlands, TX. A former global CMO of a $250M software company, he has spent his career inside the businesses he markets. His team runs paid social, search, CTV and creative for brands like Equinox, Kroger and Viceroy, and shares what works here.