Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads) Full Tutorial 2025: From Beginner to Advanced

Why Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads) Deserves Your Attention

You might think Google Ads dominates the entire digital advertising landscape, but Bing Ads (now rebranded as Microsoft Ads) is an overlooked gem. Why?

Growing Market Share: Bing’s desktop search market share has grown from 6.4% in 2021 to 10.5%, and it also aggregates traffic from other major search engines like AOL, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo. This means your ads can reach a broader audience than you might expect.
LinkedIn Data Integration: As a Microsoft product, Bing Ads leverages powerful LinkedIn data, allowing you to precisely target users based on factors like company size, industry, and even company name. This is something unattainable within Google Ads and incredibly powerful for B2B clients.
Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate: For B2B clients, we frequently observe that Bing Ads yields a lower Cost Per Lead (CPL) and a higher conversion rate, across both organic and paid search. This translates to a better return on your advertising spend.

If you’re still on the fence, now’s the time to kick off your first Bing Ads campaign!

Launching Your First Bing Ads Campaign

Ironically, the first step is often to search “Bing Ads” or “Sign up for Bing Ads” on Google or Bing itself.

Registration and Ad Credits: Bing Ads often offers lucrative sign-up bonuses, such as “Spend £200, Get £400 Ad Credit.” Make sure to take advantage of these initial perks.
Account Setup: After registering, fill in your account details and set up your billing information.

Creating a New Campaign

From the Bing Ads dashboard, click the “Create” button in the top left corner.

1. Import Google Ads Campaign (Optional)

If you already have a Google Ads campaign running, you can directly use the “Import” feature to bring over your entire campaign, including settings, ad groups, and keywords. This saves significant setup time.

2. Choose Your Campaign Objective

Bing Ads offers various campaign goals, such as:

Conversions
Leads: The most common objective for B2B or service-based companies.
Awareness: Includes Connected TV ads and Audience ads (similar to display ads).

For search campaigns, we typically select “Leads” or “Skip and choose search ads.”

3. Campaign Settings

Campaign Name: Use a clear naming convention, e.g., “Location-B2B Marketing Agency-Exact Match.”
Daily Budget: Based on experience, aim for at least 10 clicks per day to gather enough data for optimization.
Geographic Targeting: Precisely select target countries, regions, or cities. We recommend choosing “People in your targeted locations” to avoid targeting users merely searching for a location while being physically elsewhere.
Language: Automatically selected, typically English.
Ad Distribution: Crucial! We recommend selecting only “Microsoft sites and selected traffic.” If you choose “Include all sites,” your ads may appear on many irrelevant partner sites, wasting budget with very low conversion rates.

Keywords and Ad Group Setup

Enter Your Website Domain: Bing may suggest keywords based on your site content, but it’s advisable to conduct keyword research beforehand.
Create Ad Groups: Create separate ad groups for different products or services. For example, an “B2B Marketing Agency” ad group and a “LinkedIn Ads Agency” ad group.
Keyword Match Types:

Broad Match: Most expansive, potentially matching irrelevant searches.
Phrase Match: Enclosed in “double quotes,” e.g., “B2B marketing agency.”
Exact Match: Enclosed in [square brackets], e.g., [B2B marketing agency].

Recommendation: Start with Phrase Match and Exact Match to control CPC and ensure relevance. Exact Match now behaves more like the old Phrase Match, including “close variants.”

Crafting Your Ad Creative

Responsive Search Ads:

Final URL: The landing page users reach after clicking your ad.
Headlines and Descriptions: Ensure Headline 1 is highly relevant to your keywords to maintain user search intent consistency with ad content.
Leverage AI for Ad Copy: The video mentions using AI (like ChatGPT, a result of Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI) to analyze competitor reviews or general reviews, extract user pain points, and craft more compelling ad copy.
Images: You can add images to your ads to make them stand out in search results.
Pin Headlines: You can pin certain headlines to specific positions to ensure critical information (like brand name or core selling points) always appears at the forefront.

Ad Extensions:

Sitelink Extensions: Display additional links below your ad, directing users to specific pages within your website.
Callout Extensions, Structured Snippet Extensions, Price Extensions, Location Extensions, Call Extensions, etc.

Judiciously using these extensions can significantly expand your ad’s visible area, provide more information, and boost click-through rates. However, if your conversion-focused landing page is highly optimized, too many extensions might sometimes distract users.

Bidding Strategy and Optimization

Bidding Strategies:

Maximize Clicks: Suitable when you lack initial data, allowing you to set a maximum Cost Per Click (Max CPC), e.g., £10.
Maximize Conversions / Target Cost Per Acquisition (Target CPA): Switch to these strategies once your account has accumulated sufficient conversion data, allowing the system to automatically optimize bids toward your goals.

Advanced Targeting and Bid Adjustments:

Device Adjustments: Adjust bids for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices (e.g., -100% to exclude).
Day Parting: Schedule your ads to run during specific days and times based on your business hours or target audience’s active periods.
LinkedIn Data Integration: This is one of Bing Ads’ most potent features! - Company Industry: Increase bids for specific industries (e.g., manufacturing, aviation & aerospace). - Job Function: For instance, increase bids for “Marketing Managers.” - Company Name: You can even adjust bids for specific company lists.

This capability elevates B2B marketing targeting to an unprecedented level of precision, significantly improving ad relevance and conversion potential.

Conversion Tracking Setup (UET Tag)

Conversion tracking is essential for measuring ad performance. Bing Ads uses the UET Tag (Universal Event Tracking Tag).

Create UET Tag: Create a UET Tag in the Bing Ads dashboard and retrieve the code.
Deploy UET Tag:

Google Tag Manager (GTM): Recommended for deploying the UET Tag as a custom HTML tag triggered on all pages.
Directly Embed in Website Code: If you don’t use GTM, paste the code directly into your website’s <head> section.

Create Conversion Goals:

For example, define a visit to a “thank you page” (/thanks) as a conversion (e.g., “Submit Quote”).
Set the conversion goal to “Each conversion” and keep the attribution model as “Last Click.”

Enhanced Conversions:

This is a new trend addressing the gradual disappearance of third-party cookies.
By capturing hashed (anonymized) email data, Bing Ads can better match offline conversion data, providing more accurate attribution.

Conclusion

Bing Ads (Microsoft Ads) is an underestimated digital marketing tool, especially for B2B businesses and advertisers seeking a higher return on investment. With this guide, you should be able to successfully create and optimize your first Bing Ads campaign, leveraging its unique LinkedIn data targeting capabilities to stand out in the increasingly competitive digital advertising landscape.