Short answer: yes, it’s worth a test budget, and it’s one of the few paid channels left where you’re not bidding against every competitor on earth. Microsoft Ads (the platform most people still call Bing Ads) runs on roughly a tenth of Google’s search volume, but 2026 benchmark data puts its average cost-per-click at €1.20–€1.35 against Google’s €1.80–€2.10 for comparable search terms — a 30–40% discount that comes almost entirely from lower advertiser competition, not lower-quality traffic.
The catch is that “worth it” depends heavily on who you’re selling to. Bing’s user base skews older, more desktop-based, and more affluent than Google’s — which is either exactly your customer or nothing like them. Below is what we’d actually check before recommending a client spend a euro on it.
Why Is Microsoft Ads Cheaper Than Google Ads in 2026?
It comes down to auction dynamics, not audience quality. Search ad pricing is driven by how many advertisers are bidding on the same keyword at the same time. Google Ads has been the default for so long that most SME budgets go there automatically, which means the auction is crowded and CPCs get bid up. Microsoft Advertising has a fraction of that advertiser density, so the same keyword often clears at a much lower price, even though the underlying search intent is identical.
That gap shows up across almost every metric that matters to a small budget:
| Metric | Microsoft Ads (2026 benchmark) | Google Ads (2026 benchmark) |
|---|---|---|
| Average CPC (search) | ~€1.20–€1.35 | ~€1.80–€2.10 |
| Average CTR | ~4.1% | ~3.8% |
| Estimated cost per conversion | Roughly 20–30% lower | Baseline |
| Desktop search market share | ~9–14% (varies by market) | Dominant |
Those are industry-wide averages from 2026 ad-platform benchmarking reports, not a single account’s results, and they’ll move depending on your vertical — legal, insurance and finance keywords are priciest on both platforms, while ecommerce and travel tend to be cheapest. Treat the table as a starting point for your own test, not a guarantee.
Who Is Actually Searching on Bing in 2026?
This is the question that decides whether the cheaper click is a bargain or a waste of budget. Bing’s audience is structurally different from Google’s default mix:
- Skews older — the largest user segment sits in the 35–54 age bracket, versus a younger median on Google.
- More desktop-heavy, because Bing is the default search engine on every Windows PC and inside Microsoft 365 tools like Edge and Copilot.
- Higher reported household income and more management-level job titles than the average Google searcher.
- Growing fast through Copilot — Microsoft’s AI assistant now carries hundreds of millions of monthly active users, and a meaningfully higher share of those sessions show commercial intent than a typical web search.
If you sell B2B software, professional services, financial products, or anything with a higher average order value aimed at an office-based buyer, this audience profile is a genuinely good match. If your business is impulse-buy consumer ecommerce aimed at a younger, mobile-first shopper, you’ll find far less volume here and the cheaper CPC won’t make up for the smaller pool.
Where Microsoft Ads Wins — and Where It Doesn’t
It tends to work well for:
- B2B and professional services with a longer sales cycle and a higher-income buyer
- Businesses already running a full-funnel Performance Max or Search setup on Google that want incremental reach, not a replacement
- Anyone whose Google account is saturated — where Quality Score and competition have pushed CPCs high enough that a second channel is cheaper than scaling the first further
- Retailers who already have a healthy Google Shopping feed, since Microsoft Shopping campaigns can reuse the same product feed with minimal extra setup
It tends to disappoint:
- Younger-skewing consumer brands with thin margins per sale, where the smaller audience never reaches meaningful volume
- Businesses expecting Google-level traffic at Bing-level prices — the discount is real, but so is the smaller pool it’s drawn from
- Anyone unwilling to duplicate campaign structure and tracking setup for a second ads platform; Microsoft Ads has an easy Google Ads import tool, but conversion tracking and audience lists still need to be rebuilt separately
How Much Should You Actually Budget to Test It?
Don’t move your whole Google budget over on a hunch. The same logic we use for any new channel test applies here — see our 70/20/10 test budget framework for the full reasoning. In practice, that means:
- Minimum viable test: roughly €400–€500/month, enough at typical CPCs to accumulate 25–30 conversions and start reading results with some confidence.
- Timeframe: give it 4–6 weeks before judging. Microsoft’s auction and audience learning behave differently from Google’s, and the algorithm needs volume to optimize.
- What to import: use the built-in Google Ads import for campaign structure and keywords, but rebuild your conversion tracking natively in Microsoft Ads (UET tag) rather than relying only on the import — imported conversion data is frequently incomplete.
- What to watch: cost per conversion against your Google baseline, not CPC in isolation. A cheaper click that doesn’t convert is not a win.
A Practical Checklist Before You Launch
- Import your best-performing Google Search campaigns, not your whole account — start with proven keywords, not experiments.
- Set up the Microsoft UET tag independently and verify it fires correctly before spending a euro.
- Check your negative keyword list transferred correctly; Bing’s matching behavior is slightly looser than Google’s on broad match.
- If you run Shopping campaigns, connect your existing product feed through Microsoft Merchant Center rather than building a new one.
- Set a hard budget cap for the first month and resist the urge to scale before you have a clean read on cost per conversion.
What About Copilot and AI-Powered Shopping?
The part of this story that’s easy to miss is Microsoft’s push to fold advertising into Copilot itself. Copilot’s monthly active users have grown sharply through 2026, and a meaningfully higher share of Copilot sessions show purchase intent compared with a typical web search — people are asking it comparison and recommendation questions, not just looking things up. Ad formats inside Copilot are still early and click-through rates are modest so far, but the direction is clear: Microsoft is betting that assistant-based search, not the traditional results page, is where a growing share of commercial queries will happen. Advertisers who already have a Microsoft Ads account and clean product feed are better positioned to test these formats early than anyone starting from scratch later.
Common Questions We Get About Microsoft Ads
Do I need a separate budget, or can I split my existing Google budget?
Treat it as incremental, not a split. Pulling euros away from a working Google campaign to fund an unproven test on a new platform usually just trades a known return for an unknown one. Fund the Microsoft test from new budget, or from the discretionary slice you’d normally set aside for experiments.
Will Microsoft Ads cannibalize my Google traffic?
Some overlap is inevitable — a portion of Bing searchers also use Google. But because Bing’s audience skews toward users who default to Windows and Edge rather than actively choosing a browser, a meaningful share of that traffic genuinely wouldn’t have reached you through Google at all.
Is it worth it for a purely local, brick-and-mortar business?
Usually less so than for B2B or service businesses with a wider catchment area. Local search volume on Bing is a fraction of Google’s in most markets, so the absolute number of extra customers it can deliver is small. It’s rarely the first channel we’d recommend testing for a single-location local business, though it can still be worth a modest budget once your Google Local campaigns are already performing well.
So, Is It Worth It in 2026?
For most SMEs selling to an office-based, higher-income, or B2B buyer, yes — the cost advantage is real and the audience overlap with a Google-saturated account tends to be smaller than people assume, meaning genuinely incremental reach rather than cannibalized clicks. For consumer brands chasing a younger, mobile-first shopper, or single-location local businesses, the smaller pool usually isn’t worth the extra platform to manage. The honest way to find out which camp you’re in is a bounded, time-limited test rather than a permanent budget shift either way.