Yes — for the right business, and almost nobody tests it long enough to find out. Microsoft Advertising runs your search ads on Bing, Yahoo, and a handful of syndicated partners, and while the total search volume is smaller than Google's, the person searching there tends to be older, higher-income, and more likely to be the one signing off on a purchase. If your customer is a homeowner comparing contractors or a director choosing a vendor, that's not a niche audience. That's the buyer.
The channel doesn't fail because it's small. It fails because most accounts that try it are never actually built for it.
The audience is different, not just smaller
Bing's default browser status on a lot of work computers means a real share of its traffic comes from people searching during business hours, on a machine their employer set up for them — a different crowd than whoever's scrolling on a phone between errands. That skew toward an older, more established searcher is exactly why Microsoft Advertising tends to suit B2B, professional services, and premium consumer brands better than it suits impulse-purchase retail. The clicks cost less because fewer advertisers are bidding for them, not because the traffic is worth less.
Copy-pasting your Google account is why most tests fail
The single most common way businesses "try" Microsoft Advertising is importing their existing Google Ads account wholesale and letting it run. It looks efficient — same keywords, same ads, same negative keyword list, one less thing to build. It's also the reason so many of those tests get written off as "it didn't work" a month later.
A campaign built for Google's audience and Google's competition isn't automatically right for Bing's. The searchers are different, so the ad copy that earns a click should be too. The import itself can also strip or scramble your existing negative keywords and bid history in the process, meaning the campaign that lands on Microsoft is quietly worse than the one you exported. Then, because nobody was watching Bing performance separately from Google, the account gets blamed for a setup problem instead of fixed.
Done properly, importing is a starting structure, not a finished campaign — you keep the account architecture and rebuild the targeting and messaging around who's actually searching there.
The one targeting option Google doesn't have
Microsoft Advertising can layer LinkedIn profile data — company, industry, and job title — on top of a search campaign, so you're not just targeting a keyword, you're targeting a keyword typed by someone in a specific role at a specific kind of company. Google has nothing equivalent, because it doesn't have access to that data. For a professional services business selling to other businesses, that's the difference between reaching "someone who searched this phrase" and "an operations manager at a mid-size company who searched this phrase" — without paying LinkedIn's own ad rates to reach them.
It's also the feature most Microsoft Advertising accounts never turn on, because it isn't part of a standard Google campaign and won't show up if you're just cloning one over.
What it takes to actually know if it's working
None of the above matters if you can't see the results next to your Google numbers. Treating Bing performance as a side note in a separate dashboard is how a genuinely profitable channel gets shut off for looking "flat" — because nobody was measuring it on its own terms. The same conversion tracking discipline that makes a Google account trustworthy has to extend to Microsoft, or you're back to guessing which platform actually produced the lead.
Where to start
If you're deciding whether Microsoft Advertising is worth testing:
- Check whether your customer looks like Bing's audience — older, more established, more likely to be a decision-maker searching from a work computer.
- Don't just import your Google campaign and walk away. Rebuild the ad copy and targeting around who's actually there.
- Turn on LinkedIn profile targeting if you sell to other businesses — it's the one option Google can't offer.
- Track Microsoft conversions with the same rigor as Google, in one place you can actually compare.
Run it that way for a real test period, and Microsoft Advertising usually earns its keep as a second high-intent channel — not a Google clone that happens to cost less.