The cheaper half of search, run properly.

For most advertisers, yes — and the reason is cost, not size. The audience here is smaller but it converts well, particularly for business, financial, legal, industrial and considered-purchase products, and the auction has fewer serious bidders in it. That combination means clicks are usually cheaper for the same intent. The honest caveat is that it is only worth it if the account is genuinely managed: an imported copy of your Google campaigns left on autopilot will underperform, and that is the version most advertisers have tried. Run properly, it is one of the cheapest incremental channels available to a keyword advertiser.

It depends on your category, and we would rather show you your own numbers than a headline. As a reference point, Benchmarketing's 2026 dataset puts the median Microsoft Ads cost per click at $3.32 and the median cost per acquisition at $41.44, with the interquartile range running from roughly $22 to $74. What matters more than the median is that spread: the same platform produces very different economics depending on how the account is built. In an audit we model your expected cost per click and cost per lead from your own Google search term reporting before you spend anything, so the decision is made on your numbers.

Import first, absolutely — it is the fastest way to get coverage, and Microsoft supports scheduled recurring imports, with up to 100 scheduled import jobs per account, which is genuinely useful for keeping new keywords and ads in sync. What we would not do is stop there. Search behaviour differs, the auction is thinner, and the audience skews older and more professional, so keyword lists, match types, negatives and ad copy all want adjusting. Our rule is import for coverage, then rebuild for performance, then keep a light scheduled import running so nothing new gets stranded on one platform.

It is the set of partner sites and properties that show Microsoft results alongside Bing itself, and the answer is: use it, but never blind. Partner traffic can be excellent value in some categories and noisy in others, and the mistake we see most often is leaving it bundled with owned traffic so the two cannot be told apart. We segment it from day one, judge it on its own conversion rate and cost per acquisition, and adjust or exclude it on evidence. That takes one reporting decision at setup and it saves the argument later, because you can see exactly what each source of traffic is worth.

Categories where the buyer is at a desk during working hours, and categories with a considered purchase. Microsoft publishes its audience reach from Comscore desktop PC data measured in December 2025, and the people it describes are older, higher-income and more likely to be using a work machine. In practice that means business software, professional and financial services, legal, healthcare, industrial and manufacturing, higher education and home services tend to perform well. Younger consumer and impulse categories are usually thinner here — we will say so in the audit rather than take the budget.

On absolute contribution, not on percentages of a small base. A channel producing fifteen good leads a month at half your usual spend per lead is worth reporting even though its share of traffic looks minor, and a channel producing fifty cheap leads that never close is not. So we reconcile conversions against your CRM or booking system, import the qualified and closed outcomes back into the account, and report CPA per qualified lead and revenue rather than raw conversions. Where volume is genuinely thin, we use longer reporting windows so decisions are made on enough numbers to mean something.

Yes, and for retailers the shopping side is often where the value sits. That work starts with the feed: titles, attributes, availability and pricing kept accurate, because feed quality decides how much of the catalogue is eligible to show at all. Beyond shopping we run audience ads across the Microsoft network, with prospecting and remarketing segmented by intent rather than pooled into one list. Both get their own budget and their own read, so a display-style placement never quietly borrows credit for a Bing lead.

The first engagement is a fixed-price audit and rebuild, quoted before you commit, covering the audit, the structural work, tracking, copy and a a reporting baseline. Ongoing Bing PPC management is a monthly fee scoped to the size and complexity of the account rather than a percentage of media spend — percentage pricing rewards us for spending more of your money, which is the wrong incentive on a channel where the whole point is efficiency. If the audit shows Microsoft Ads is not worth your budget, we will tell you that and stop there.

Very little, and less than the alternative. What we need is access, one person who can answer questions about what a good lead looks like, and roughly an hour a fortnight to look at the numbers with us. We handle the build, the query report reviews, the copy, the feed and the reporting. Where we do ask for help is offline conversion data — the difference between bidding on form fills and bidding on closed revenue is the single biggest lever on a lead generation account, and it needs a small amount of cooperation from whoever owns the CRM.

Ask three questions and the field narrows quickly. First, who actually does the work — the named specialists on your account, or a junior team behind the person in the pitch? Second, what does the agency do in the first thirty days: a real audit of your Bing account with priced findings is a different service from a template deck of best practices. Third, how is success defined — clicks and impressions, or qualified leads and revenue reconciled against your own system? Good agencies will also tell you when the channel is not worth your budget. That answer is the strongest signal of expertise you will get.

Week one is access, discovery and definitions: what a good lead looks like, which products carry margin, which markets matter. Weeks two and three are the audit and the fix list, with each finding priced so you can see what the problems spend. Week four is the rebuild starting on the highest-value items — usually conversion tracking, negative keyword lists and campaign structure. You get a weekly working session with the specialists doing the work and one written monthly review. Most clients see the wasted spend fall before they see the new volume arrive, which is the right order.

Yes. The Microsoft network's share of desktop search varies significantly by country, so the first thing we do for a multi-market brand is size the opportunity per market rather than assume it travels. Some markets justify a full build; others are worth a light, well-negotiated presence on the highest intent keywords only. We manage the account centrally with market-level budgets, currencies, ad copy and negative lists, and report per market so the weaker ones are visible rather than hidden inside a global average.

We can, and it usually works better that way because the two auctions inform each other: keyword discoveries here feed the Google build, and vice versa. Our paid search, SEO and conversion tracking teams work from the same measurement and the same plan. It is equally fine to buy this channel alone while another agency runs Google — we will share what we learn with them, because a search programme split between two teams who do not talk is the expensive way to do it.