Microsoft Advertising Platform Features: A Practical Guide for UK Businesses

Most businesses running paid search put everything into Google Ads and leave it there. That makes sense, Google has the largest share of searches by a long way. But Microsoft Advertising reaches a different slice of people, often at a lower cost per click, and it is worth understanding what it actually does before you write it off.

This is a plain nuts and bolts guide to what Microsoft Advertising offers. We will cover how the platform works, what types of campaigns you can run, and where it tends to perform well for UK businesses.

Microsoft Advertising (previously called Bing Ads) is Microsoft’s paid advertising platform. When someone searches on Bing, your ads can appear in the results. But it does not stop there, the Microsoft Advertising network also covers Yahoo, AOL, and a range of partner sites, so your ads can reach people beyond Bing itself.

In the UK, Bing holds somewhere around 5 to 8 percent of the search market. That sounds small, but in absolute terms it still represents millions of searches every month. For some sectors, the audience on Microsoft’s network is actually more valuable than its size suggests.

This matters for deciding whether Microsoft Advertising is right for your business. The Bing user base in the UK skews older, higher income, and more likely to be using a desktop or laptop, partly because Windows devices ship with Edge and Bing set as defaults, and partly because people who actively choose to use Bing tend to be older users who are less likely to switch to Google.

That makes Microsoft Advertising a particularly good fit for:

• Financial services and insurance, where the audience tends to be older and more affluent
• B2B products and services, because a lot of business searches happen on work devices running Windows
• Home improvement and property, where the buyer is often 45 and over
• Legal, medical, and professional services, again, older and higher income searchers
• Luxury goods and travel, where the audience demographics match well
  If your target customer is 18 to 25, Microsoft Advertising is probably less relevant. If they are 40 and over and buying something considered, it is worth a look.

This is the core of the platform. You write text ads, choose keywords, set bids, and your ads appear when someone searches for those terms on Bing and its partner sites. If you have already run Google Search campaigns, the structure will feel familiar, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads all work in a similar way.

Microsoft even has an import tool that lets you pull your Google Ads campaigns directly into Microsoft Advertising. It does not always translate perfectly and you should check everything after importing, but it speeds up the setup considerably.

If you sell products online, Microsoft Shopping lets you show product listings with images and prices in the search results. These work in a similar way to Google Shopping. You connect your product feed through the Microsoft Merchant Centre and the platform matches your products to relevant searches.

Competition on Microsoft Shopping tends to be lower than Google, which can mean better visibility at a lower cost for the same products.

Audience ads show across the Microsoft Audience Network, a collection of websites and apps including MSN, Outlook, and Microsoft Start (previously Microsoft News). These are display-style ads, shown to people based on their interests and behaviour rather than what they are actively searching for.

They work in a similar way to Google Display, but with a different inventory. If your product or service needs a bit of warm-up before someone searches for it, audience ads can help put it in front of the right people earlier in the process.

Multimedia ads are a newer format that combine multiple images, headlines, and descriptions to create richer, more visual ads in the search results. Microsoft assembles different combinations automatically and serves the ones that perform best.

The specs are specific, you can provide up to 15 images, 5 headlines, and 5 descriptions, and Microsoft mixes and matches. These ads tend to take up more space in the results, which can help with visibility.

Instead of building out keyword lists manually, dynamic search ads let Microsoft scan your website and automatically match your pages to relevant searches. When someone searches for something that matches your site content, Microsoft generates an ad headline based on the page and sends them to the most relevant landing page.

This is useful for large sites with lots of products or service pages where keeping keyword lists fully up to date would be time-consuming. It can also catch searches you had not thought to target.

This is now the standard text ad format on Microsoft Advertising. You provide up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, and Microsoft tests different combinations to find out what works. Over time the platform learns which combinations drive the most clicks and shows those more often.

The benefit is that you do not have to manually write every ad variation, the platform does the testing for you. The trade-off is less direct control over exactly what appears in each ad.

Microsoft has its own version of Performance Max, which is a campaign type that runs across all of Microsoft’s channels using a single campaign. You provide assets, images, headlines, descriptions, videos if you have them and the platform decides where and when to show them.

This is still relatively new on Microsoft compared to Google, and the reporting is less detailed. It works best when you already have good conversion data in the account for the platform to learn from.

Like Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising uses broad, phrase, and exact match keywords. Broad match has become more flexible over the years, it will match to searches that are related to your keyword even if the words are not all present. Exact match keeps things tighter. Most campaigns benefit from a mix.

Microsoft has a solid range of audience options:

• In-market audiences – people who are actively researching a particular product or service category
• Remarketing – showing ads to people who have previously visited your website
• Customer match – uploading a list of email addresses to target your existing customers
• LinkedIn Profile Targeting – this is something Google cannot offer. Because Microsoft owns LinkedIn, you can layer LinkedIn data onto your campaigns and target by job title, company, or industry. This is particularly powerful for B2B campaigns.
• Similar audiences – reaching new people who look like your existing customers or website visitors

You can target by country, region, city, or postcode area. For UK businesses targeting specific areas, a local service firm, a regional retailer – this works well. You can also exclude locations where you do not operate.

You can adjust bids up or down based on whether someone is on desktop, tablet, or mobile. You can also set ad schedules so your ads only run during certain hours or days – useful for businesses that can only take calls at certain times.

The two platforms are similar in structure but different in a few important ways:

• Cost per click – Microsoft Advertising tends to have lower CPCs in most sectors. Less competition means you can often get clicks for less.
• Volume – Google has significantly more search volume, especially on mobile. Microsoft will usually deliver fewer clicks in total, even if the cost per click is lower.
• Audience – as above, Bing’s audience skews older and more desktop-based. Depending on your customers, this may be an advantage.
• LinkedIn targeting – Microsoft’s ability to layer LinkedIn data is unique and genuinely useful for B2B advertisers.
  Import from Google – the ability to pull campaigns from Google Ads makes getting started much faster than building from scratch.
• Competition – in some niches, there are far fewer advertisers on Microsoft than on Google. That means less competition, lower CPCs, and sometimes better positioning.

The honest answer on whether to use it is this: if Google Ads is already working for you and you have the budget, running Microsoft Advertising alongside it is usually worth testing. You will likely find it delivers a lower volume of conversions, but often at a better cost.

Microsoft Advertising works on a pay-per-click model, you only pay when someone clicks your ad. You set a daily budget for each campaign, and spending stops once that budget is reached for the day.

• You can set bids manually, or use one of Microsoft’s automated bidding strategies:
• Target CPA – Microsoft tries to get conversions at your target cost per acquisition
• Target ROAS – the platform optimises for a target return on ad spend, useful for ecommerce
• Maximise clicks – spends your budget to get as many clicks as possible
• Maximise conversions – focuses on getting the most conversions within your budget
• Enhanced CPC – adjusts your manual bids up or down based on the likelihood of a conversion

For accounts with limited conversion data, starting on manual or enhanced CPC and moving to automated bidding once you have data is usually the sensible approach.

Microsoft Advertising has its own conversion tracking tag, similar to Google’s. You add the Universal Event Tracking (UET) tag to your website and then set up goals – purchases, form completions, phone calls, whatever matters to your business.

Once tracking is in place, the platform can report on which keywords, ads, and campaigns are driving real results, not just clicks.
Microsoft also has an auto-tagging feature that helps pass data through to analytics, and it integrates with Google Analytics 4 if you are using that to track your site.

The short answer: for many businesses, yes – but it works better as a complement to Google than a replacement.
It is particularly worth considering if:

• You are in a sector with an older, more affluent audience
• You are targeting B2B buyers and want to use LinkedIn profile data for targeting
• Your Google Ads CPCs are high and you want to find volume at a lower cost
• You already have Google Ads campaigns that you can import to get started quickly
• You want to cover as much of the paid search landscape as possible

It is less likely to be a priority if your audience is primarily young and mobile-first, your budget is very limited and concentrated on Google, or you are in a sector where Bing simply does not index relevant searches well.

Setting up a Microsoft Advertising account is free. You create an account at ads.microsoft.com, set up your billing, and either build campaigns from scratch or import from Google Ads.

If you already have Google Ads running, using the import tool to get your campaigns live quickly makes sense. Then spend some time reviewing what came across – match types, bid strategies, and extensions do not always translate perfectly.

Give any new campaign at least four to six weeks before drawing conclusions. The platform needs time to gather data, and performance in the first couple of weeks is rarely representative of what you will see long term.

Microsoft Advertising is not a replacement for Google – the volume is not there. But it is a genuine, often underused channel that can deliver solid results at a lower cost per click, particularly for UK businesses targeting older or professional audiences.

The platform has more features than most people give it credit for. Search, shopping, audience ads, LinkedIn targeting, dynamic ads, it covers a lot of ground. If you have been running paid search exclusively on Google and you have not looked at Microsoft Advertising properly, it is worth setting up a test.

If you want help setting it up or want an honest assessment of whether it is likely to work for your business, get in touch with us at McAllister Digital.