Every small business owner who looks into paid search hits the same fork in the road. Google Ads is the obvious giant. Microsoft Ads (the platform formerly known as Bing Ads) keeps showing up in articles promising cheaper clicks. With a limited budget, which one deserves your money first?
Having managed campaigns on both platforms for years, I can tell you the honest answer is not “it depends” and it is not “both.” There is a right order for most small businesses: start with Google Ads, then add Microsoft Ads as a low-cost extension once Google is profitable. Here is how to think it through.
How different are the Google and Bing audiences?
Google handles the overwhelming majority of search traffic, so its reach is unmatched. But Microsoft’s Bing network is not a miniature Google. Its users skew older, more likely to be on a desktop computer, and more likely to be searching from a workplace, because Bing is the default search engine on millions of corporate Windows machines and inside the Edge browser.
That profile matters. If your customers are homeowners over 50, business-to-business decision makers, or office workers researching purchases from their desks, Bing’s audience is disproportionately full of them. If you sell to 25-year-olds on their phones, it mostly is not.
The case for Microsoft Ads: cheaper clicks, less competition
Because fewer advertisers compete on Microsoft Ads, cost per click routinely comes in meaningfully lower than Google for the same keyword. In some service industries the gap is dramatic. Lower competition also means it is easier to hold top ad positions without aggressive bidding.
Microsoft also makes starting easy: its import tool copies your Google Ads campaigns over almost one-to-one, so the setup cost of a second platform is a fraction of what it once was.
The case for Google Ads: this is where the volume lives
Everything good about Microsoft Ads comes with one large asterisk: volume. For many local searches, Bing simply does not have enough monthly queries to spend a meaningful budget. A cheap click you can only get 40 times a month does not grow a business.
Google’s volume also produces data faster. Conversion data is the fuel for every optimization decision, from which keywords to cut to how the bidding algorithms learn. A campaign that gathers a month’s worth of learning on Google might need half a year to gather the same evidence on Bing.
A note for regulated industries
If you operate in a regulated space, the platform question gets a second layer. Healthcare is the clearest example: advertising policies around personalized targeting, remarketing, and certain treatment keywords differ between platforms and are enforced unevenly. Practices that treat this as an afterthought end up with disapproved ads or, worse, compliance exposure. It is one of the reasons specialized healthcare marketing support exists as its own discipline rather than generic account management.
The practical answer: Google first, Microsoft as the profitable echo
For most small businesses the sequence looks like this:
- Start on Google Ads. Prove that paid search works for your business where the volume is. Get conversion tracking solid, find your profitable keywords, and build landing pages that convert.
- Import to Microsoft Ads once Google is profitable. Use the import tool, tighten the settings it copies imperfectly (location targeting and budgets deserve special attention), and treat it as a low-cost extension of a proven playbook.
- Compare cost per lead, not cost per click. Cheap clicks that never convert are expensive. Judge both platforms on what a customer actually costs you.
Run in that order, Microsoft Ads becomes something rare in advertising: nearly free incremental growth. You already paid to learn what works. Bing just lets you rerun the winning play at a discount. This is exactly how we structure Google and Bing Ads management for our own clients, and the second platform regularly delivers leads at 20 to 40 percent below the Google cost.
What mistakes should you avoid when running both?
A few traps catch nearly everyone who expands to two platforms:
- Importing once and never syncing again, so the Bing account slowly drifts out of date while the Google account improves.
- Judging Microsoft Ads after two weeks. Low volume means it needs more time to show its real numbers.
- Copying Google’s bids directly. Microsoft auctions are cheaper, and imported bids are often higher than they need to be.
- Forgetting Microsoft’s separate tracking tag. Without its Universal Event Tracking installed, none of your conversions will record.
The bottom line
Google Ads first, because volume and data beat cheap clicks when you are proving what works. Microsoft Ads second, because rerunning a proven campaign at a lower cost per click is the easiest win in paid search. And neither platform matters until conversion tracking works, since you cannot scale what you cannot measure.
For more plain-English guidance on stretching a small advertising budget, the marketing for small business section of the Demand Mojo blog covers this and related topics without the agency jargon.
About the author
Michael Hoskins is the founder of Demand Mojo, a digital advertising agency specializing in Google Ads and Microsoft Ads for small and mid-sized businesses. Before founding the agency he managed multi-million dollar advertising budgets in-house.
