Is Microsoft Advertising Worth It for a Denver Business?

Every few months a Denver business owner asks me some version of the same question: should we be running ads on Bing?

The answer they usually get from an agency is an enthusiastic yes, followed by a stat about how much cheaper the clicks are. And the stat is real. But it’s also the least useful way to make this decision, and it’s how a lot of businesses end up with a Microsoft Ads account that quietly burns $400 a month and produces almost nothing.

Here’s how I actually think about it after two decades of running both platforms.

First, the name confusion:

If you’re searching for “Bing Ads,” you’re using a name Microsoft retired in April 2019. The platform is Microsoft Advertising now, and the change wasn’t only cosmetic — it reflected the fact that your ads no longer run just on Bing. They run across the Microsoft Search Network, which includes Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL, and a syndicated network of partner sites, plus placements inside Microsoft properties.

That last part matters more than most people realize, and I’ll come back to it, because it’s where a lot of Microsoft Ads budgets go to die.

The cheap-clicks argument, and what it leaves out:

The numbers people quote are roughly accurate. WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks put the average Microsoft Ads CPC around $1.37 against roughly $2.06 on Google — call it a third cheaper — with cost per conversion running about $31 versus $45. In competitive verticals the gap is wider. Legal services, for example, come in around $3.11 versus $5.80.

So yes, Bing Ads clicks cost less.

But cost per click is a rate, not an outcome, and a lower rate on a pool that’s too small to matter is not a win. The question that actually decides this is how much relevant search volume exists in your category, in your market, on that network — and that number is a lot smaller than the CPC comparison implies.

Statcounter had Bing at about 14.2% of US desktop search as of March 2026, or roughly 18.7% once you fold in Yahoo, which is served by the same ad network. Those are the friendliest numbers available, because they’re desktop-only. Fold mobile back in and the share drops substantially, since Bing has very little mobile presence.

Now localize it. You’re not advertising to the United States. You’re advertising to the Denver metro, in one vertical, to people with commercial intent, at the moment they’re searching. Take a modest slice of an already modest share and you can end up with a genuinely small number of monthly searches — sometimes a few dozen.

That’s not an argument against running it. It’s an argument for finding out the actual number before you commit, rather than after.

The audience difference is the real story.

Where Microsoft Advertising gets interesting isn’t price. It’s who’s on the other side of the search.

Microsoft’s own audience data — and I’d flag clearly that these are Microsoft’s numbers about Microsoft’s audience, so treat them as directional rather than gospel — puts around 42% of its users in the 35–54 bracket compared to about 34% on Google, roughly 46% holding a college degree against 38%, and about 40% in households above $75,000 versus 31%.

The reason behind this isn’t mysterious, and it’s the part worth understanding: Bing is the default search engine in Windows and Edge, and a very large number of corporate IT departments never change it. So a meaningful share of Bing’s search volume is people at work, on a company machine, during business hours.

For a consumer business selling to a broad audience, that skew is mildly interesting. For a B2B company, a professional services firm, a commercial contractor, or anyone selling to people who are researching from a desk at their employer, it can be genuinely valuable — and it’s the single best reason to test the platform.

There’s also one targeting capability Google simply doesn’t have. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, you can layer LinkedIn profile targeting onto search campaigns: company, industry, and job function. If you sell to operations managers at manufacturing companies, being able to bid more aggressively when the searcher matches that profile is a real advantage, not a marketing bullet point.

The import trap:

Microsoft makes it genuinely easy to import your Google Ads campaigns. One-click, everything comes over, and you’re live in an afternoon.

This is the most common way Microsoft Ads accounts get set up, and it’s also the most common reason they underperform.

The import copies your campaign structure, your keywords, your budgets, and your bids. What it can’t copy is the reasoning behind them. Your Google account is tuned to a different auction with different competitors, different bid landscapes, and considerably more volume. Drop that structure into a network with a fraction of the traffic and a few things break at once:

Your budgets are wrong. Budgets calibrated to Google volume will sit unspent, which sounds harmless but starves your campaigns of the data that automated bidding needs to function.

Your match types behave differently. With less volume, tight exact-match structures that work well on Google can go almost dormant. Microsoft’s auction usually rewards a looser structure than the one you’re importing.

Your automated bidding strategies have nothing to learn from. Smart bidding needs conversion volume. Import a Target CPA strategy into an account generating six conversions a month and it will not work. Manual or enhanced CPC is frequently the better call at that scale, which is the opposite of current Google best practice.

And the syndicated search partners are on by default. This is the one I’d flag hardest. Microsoft’s partner network sends traffic from a long list of third-party sites, and the quality varies enormously. On Google, search partners are a rounding error. On Microsoft, they can be a large share of your spend, and I’ve audited plenty of accounts where partner traffic was consuming most of the budget while converting at a fraction of the rate of Bing proper.

You can segment your reporting by “Bing and AOL” versus “Syndicated search partners” and see this in about ninety seconds. Most accounts I look at have never had that report run. If the syndicated traffic isn’t converting, exclude it — and if the account’s numbers looked disappointing before you did, they often look considerably better afterward.

So how do you decide?

Here’s the sequence I’d actually run, in order:

1. Check the volume before you spend anything. Microsoft’s Keyword Planner will give you search volume for your terms, and you can filter to the Denver metro. If your top twenty commercial keywords total a few hundred monthly searches, there’s a real test here. If they total thirty, there isn’t — and no amount of cheap CPCs changes that.

2. Look at your Google Analytics for organic Bing traffic. If Bing already sends you organic visitors who convert, that’s the strongest signal you’ll get that your buyers use it. It’s free to check and most businesses never look.

3. Ask whether your customer researches from work. B2B, commercial, professional services, higher-ticket considered purchases — the skew works in your favor. Impulse consumer purchases on mobile, much less so.
4. If you test, budget honestly and give it a real window. A test that can’t generate enough conversions to be readable isn’t a test, it’s a donation. And build it fresh rather than importing — or at minimum, rebuild budgets, bidding, and match types after importing, and turn off syndicated partners until you’ve proven they work.

The part most PPC agencies won’t say:

For a lot of Denver businesses, the honest answer is that Microsoft Advertising should be a modest, well-managed complement to a Google program that’s already working — not a priority, and not a rescue plan for Google campaigns that are underperforming. If your Google account isn’t converting, Microsoft won’t fix it. The problems that break a Google account, bad targeting, weak landing pages, poor offer, untracked conversions, break a Microsoft account identically and with less volume to recover from.

But when the volume is there and your buyers are the desk-at-work demographic, it’s frequently the most underpriced inventory in search — precisely because most of your competitors haven’t bothered.

That’s the whole case. Smaller pool, better-qualified audience in specific categories, meaningfully cheaper, and largely ignored by your competition. Worth checking. Not worth assuming.

If you’d like someone to run those numbers for your category before you commit a budget, that’s a short conversation and I’m glad to have it. You can see how I approach Microsoft Advertising management, or contact me directly for a free professional assessment of your Microsoft Advertising campagins.