Do You Need a Bing Ads Consultant? A Practical Guide to Microsoft Advertising

People still search for a "Bing Ads consultant" even though the platform hasn't been called Bing Ads since 2019. It's Microsoft Advertising now — but the old name stuck, and honestly, so did the old perception: the search engine nobody uses, the channel nobody bothers with.

That perception is exactly why it's worth a look. Most of your competitors aren't there, and the ones who are usually just imported their Google campaigns and walked away.

This post covers where Microsoft Ads genuinely earns its budget, the import trap almost everyone falls into, and whether you need a dedicated consultant for it — or just a Google Ads consultant who takes the second search engine seriously.

Where Bing Traffic Actually Comes From

"Nobody uses Bing" misses how the Microsoft search network works. Your ads don't just show on bing.com — they reach:

Windows and Edge defaults. Every Windows machine ships with Edge and Bing as the starting point, and a meaningful share of users — especially on corporate-managed desktops — never change it.
Syndication partners. DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Yahoo, and AOL all serve search ads through Microsoft Advertising. Privacy-conscious users who deliberately left Google are still reachable here.
Copilot and AI surfaces. Microsoft has been folding advertising into its AI search experiences, which is worth watching even if it's early.

The practical consequence: the audience skews desktop, workplace, and older — people searching from an office machine during business hours. If you sell to businesses, professionals, or an older demographic, that skew works in your favor. If you sell impulse products to a mobile-first audience under 30, it mostly doesn't.

What's Genuinely Different From Google Ads

Microsoft Advertising looks so much like Google Ads that it's easy to treat it as a clone. A few things are actually different, and two of them matter:

LinkedIn profile targeting. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, you can layer bid adjustments by company, industry, and job function onto search campaigns in supported markets. Google has nothing equivalent. For B2B, this alone can justify the channel.
Less auction pressure. Fewer advertisers compete for the same queries, which generally means cheaper clicks than the equivalent Google auction. I won't quote a percentage — it varies wildly by industry and country — but if you already know your Google CPCs, running the same terms on Microsoft is a cheap experiment to get your own number.
The Microsoft Audience Network. Native placements across MSN, Outlook, and Edge. Useful in some accounts, but it's a different beast from search intent — watch whether it's quietly enabled on your campaigns.
Smaller everything. Less volume, fewer impressions, slower data accumulation. Tests that take a week to read in Google can take a month here.

The Google Import Trap

The Google Import tool is the best thing about Microsoft Advertising: it copies your campaigns, keywords, ads, and settings across in minutes, and can even re-sync on a schedule.

It is also the reason most Microsoft Ads accounts underperform. An unreviewed import silently carries across assumptions that were made for a different platform:

Bids and budgets sized for Google's volume and auction prices — usually too high for Microsoft's cheaper, thinner traffic.
Partner and network settings that don't map one-to-one. Where your ads syndicate, and whether audience-network placements are included, deserves a deliberate decision, not an inherited default.
Match type and negative keyword behavior that differs subtly. Close variants and broad match don't expand identically to Google's — the same keyword list catches different queries.
Tracking templates and UTM parameters that still say google in them, quietly mislabeling every Microsoft click in your analytics.
Smart bidding strategies imported without the conversion data to support them. A brand-new account with near-zero conversion history can't feed an automated strategy the way your mature Google account does.

Import is a great starting point. The accounts that work treat the import as a draft and re-decide budgets, networks, and bidding for the platform they're actually on.

Measurement First — UET Before You Spend

Microsoft's equivalent of the Google tag is the UET tag (Universal Event Tracking), and conversion goals are built on top of it. Two things matter here:

Deploy it properly, once. Google Tag Manager has a built-in UET tag template, so if your GTM container is well-structured, adding Microsoft tracking is an afternoon, not a project — and it stays consistent with your consent setup.
Mirror your Google conversion definitions exactly. Same actions, same counting rules, same naming. The whole point of a second channel is comparing it to the first; if "lead" means something different in each platform, every comparison you make afterward is noise.

And the same rule that applies to Google applies here: platform-reported conversions tell you about volume, not quality. If lead quality is what pays your bills, the case for offline conversion tracking is identical on Microsoft — arguably stronger, since smaller volume makes every mis-scored lead count more.

When Microsoft Ads Is Worth It — and When It Isn't

It's worth being blunt about the order of operations, because the channel is a complement, not a rescue.

Microsoft Ads makes sense when:

Google Search is already profitable and you want incremental volume on the same proven queries
You're hitting diminishing returns on Google — impression share is maxed and the next dollar there buys worse clicks than the first dollar on Bing
You're B2B and want the LinkedIn profile layer
Your audience skews desktop, professional, or older

It usually doesn't make sense when:

Google Ads isn't working yet — the same problems will follow you at lower volume
Your total budget is small enough that splitting it leaves neither platform with enough data to learn from
Your audience is overwhelmingly mobile and young

So — Do You Need a Dedicated Bing Ads Consultant?

Usually not a separate one. The skills are 90% the same, and the strategic questions — what a lead is worth, which queries convert, how bidding should be calibrated — are answered once and applied to both platforms. What you want is a Google Ads consultant who treats Microsoft as a real channel rather than a checkbox.

Two questions expose the difference quickly:

"How would you set up Microsoft Ads for us?" — If the answer is just "import your Google campaigns," that's a checkbox.
"How would you decide whether it's working?" — The right answer involves matched conversion definitions and a comparison against your Google numbers, not platform-reported metrics in isolation.

Final Takeaway

Microsoft Advertising is neither a secret weapon nor a waste of time. It's a smaller, cheaper, older-skewing version of the channel you already run — with one genuinely unique capability for B2B and a user base your competitors mostly ignore.

Earn profitability on Google first. Then import as a draft, not a deployment; put the UET tag through the same GTM discipline as the rest of your stack; mirror your conversion definitions; and judge the channel on the same numbers you judge Google by. Do that, and "the other search engine" becomes a quiet, dependable source of incremental growth.