Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads) for Indian Businesses: Complete Guide 2026

Nearly every advertiser in India defaults to Google Ads without ever testing Microsoft Ads, the advertising platform behind Bing, Microsoft’s own properties, and a network of syndicated partner search results, despite Microsoft Ads consistently delivering lower cost per click and less competition for many of the same keywords already running in a Google Ads account. Microsoft Ads is not a replacement for Google Ads, since Bing’s search share in India remains well behind Google’s, but as a complementary channel that reuses most of your existing keyword research and often imports directly from an existing Google Ads account, it represents one of the lowest-effort, highest-return additions available to an already-running search advertising strategy. This guide covers how to set up, structure, and optimize Microsoft Ads for Indian businesses in 2026, building on the foundation covered in our complete Google Ads guide.

What Is Microsoft Ads?

Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing Ads) is Microsoft’s search and native advertising platform, serving ads across Bing search results, Microsoft’s own network of sites like MSN and Outlook.com, and a range of syndicated search partners. Microsoft Ads also inherits some of the audience demographic advantages of the Windows and Microsoft 365 ecosystem, since a meaningful share of Bing’s user base skews toward desktop users, professionals, and enterprise environments where Windows and Edge are the default browser and search engine, an audience segment that can be harder to reach efficiently through mobile-first platforms like Meta or Instagram, and one that many advertisers overlook simply because Bing rarely comes up as a default consideration when planning a search advertising budget.

Why Indian Businesses Should Consider Microsoft Ads in 2026

The core argument for Microsoft Ads is straightforward economics: significantly less advertiser competition than Google Ads for many of the same keywords translates directly into lower CPCs, often by half or more in competitive categories where Google Ads auctions have become expensive. For B2B businesses, professional services, and software companies specifically, the Bing and Windows-skewing desktop and enterprise audience often converts particularly well, since this demographic overlaps meaningfully with typical B2B buyer profiles, corporate professionals using company-issued Windows laptops during working hours, a segment often underrepresented on mobile-first ad platforms relative to its actual purchasing influence within a business. Businesses already running Google Ads can import their entire account structure, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ad copy, directly into Microsoft Ads with minimal rework, making the incremental effort to test the platform considerably lower than starting an entirely new channel from scratch, and this low switching cost is precisely why testing Microsoft Ads is one of the easiest incremental wins available to any business already running a mature Google Ads account.

How Much Do Microsoft Ads Cost in India in 2026?

Metric	Typical Range (INR)
CPC (Search)	Rs.3 to Rs.20
CPC (Google Ads, for comparison)	Rs.8 to Rs.45
Minimum recommended daily budget	Rs.300 to Rs.800

The magnitude of savings varies considerably by category, with highly competitive industries like finance, insurance, and legal services often seeing the largest gap between Microsoft Ads and Google Ads CPCs, simply because fewer advertisers have discovered or bothered to test the platform in these categories despite the same high commercial intent existing among Bing searchers. Search volume on Microsoft Ads is naturally lower than Google given Bing’s smaller market share in India, so campaigns typically generate a smaller absolute number of clicks and conversions than an equivalent Google Ads campaign, but often at a meaningfully better cost per conversion, which is the tradeoff most businesses should expect and accept when adding the platform rather than judging it against Google Ads’ far larger scale.

Importing Your Google Ads Account Into Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Ads provides a native Google Ads import tool that copies your entire account structure, including campaigns, ad groups, keywords, negative keywords, and ad copy, directly into a new Microsoft Ads account, dramatically reducing the setup time compared to building campaigns from scratch. After importing, review and adjust bids specifically for Microsoft Ads rather than leaving imported bids identical to your Google Ads account, since the competitive landscape and click-through rate patterns differ enough between the two platforms that identical bids rarely produce identical results. It is also worth reviewing imported ad copy for any Google-specific references or extensions that may not translate cleanly, and confirming conversion tracking is separately configured for Microsoft Ads rather than assuming the imported campaign structure automatically carries over your Google Ads conversion tracking setup.

Microsoft Ads Campaign Types

• Search campaigns – text ads shown on Bing search results and syndicated partner search results, functioning similarly to Google Search campaigns and the natural starting point for most advertisers.
• Microsoft Audience Network (native/display) – native-style ads shown across Microsoft’s own properties like MSN and Outlook.com, useful for awareness and remarketing beyond search intent alone.
• Shopping campaigns – product listing ads for e-commerce, pulling from a product feed similar to Google Shopping, well suited to retailers already maintaining a Google Merchant Center feed since Microsoft Ads can often import that same feed structure.
• Performance Max – Microsoft’s automated, goal-based campaign type spanning multiple placements, mirroring Google’s own Performance Max approach for advertisers who prefer a more automated setup.

Setting Up Your First Microsoft Ads Campaign: Step by Step

1. Create a Microsoft Ads account and use the Google Ads import tool if you already have an active Search campaign, rather than rebuilding keyword research and ad copy from scratch.
2. Install the Microsoft Ads UET tag (Universal Event Tracking) on your website, Microsoft’s equivalent of the Google tag, to enable conversion tracking and remarketing audience collection.
3. Review and adjust imported bids for the lower-competition Microsoft Ads environment, since bids copied directly from Google Ads are often higher than necessary to achieve competitive ad positions on Bing.
4. Adjust audience and demographic targeting if relevant to your business, since Microsoft Ads offers LinkedIn profile-based targeting for B2B advertisers, a genuinely unique targeting option unavailable on Google Ads.
5. Launch with a modest daily budget and monitor performance for at least two weeks before scaling, since Bing’s lower search volume means campaigns need a longer window to accumulate statistically meaningful data than an equivalent Google Ads campaign.
6. Compare cost per conversion directly against your Google Ads campaigns for the same keywords, using this comparison to decide how much incremental budget the platform justifies relative to your existing Google Ads spend.

LinkedIn Profile Targeting: Microsoft Ads’ Unique B2B Advantage

Since Microsoft owns LinkedIn, Microsoft Ads offers a targeting option unavailable on any other search platform: the ability to layer LinkedIn profile data, company, industry, and job function, on top of standard Search campaigns. For B2B advertisers already running LinkedIn Ads, this creates a genuinely distinctive opportunity to combine search intent with professional targeting precision in a single platform, bidding more aggressively when a search comes from someone matching a specific company size, industry, or job function profile. This targeting option alone is often reason enough for a B2B business already active on LinkedIn to test Microsoft Ads Search campaigns, since no other search advertising platform offers anything comparable, and businesses that already understand LinkedIn’s targeting value from running LinkedIn Ads directly tend to grasp this advantage faster than teams encountering it for the first time on Microsoft Ads alone.

Common Mistakes When Running Microsoft Ads

• Assuming imported Google Ads bids will produce identical results without any adjustment for Microsoft Ads’ different competitive environment.
• Judging the platform after only a few days given Bing’s naturally lower search volume in India compared to Google.
• Neglecting to set up separate conversion tracking specifically for Microsoft Ads rather than assuming imported campaigns carry over Google’s tracking configuration.
• Ignoring LinkedIn profile targeting entirely for B2B campaigns, missing the platform’s single most distinctive competitive advantage.
• Treating Microsoft Ads as a full Google Ads replacement rather than a complementary, lower-cost addition to an existing search strategy.

A Realistic Example: A B2B Software Company Testing Microsoft Ads

Consider an Indian B2B software company running a mature, well-optimized Google Ads Search account with rising CPCs in an increasingly competitive category. Importing the account into Microsoft Ads and reducing bids by roughly a third from their Google Ads levels to reflect the lower-competition environment, the company sees a smaller absolute volume of clicks, as expected given Bing’s smaller search share, but a meaningfully lower cost per lead than their Google Ads campaigns for the same set of high-intent keywords. Layering LinkedIn profile targeting for job titles and company sizes matching their ideal customer profile further improves lead quality, and after two months of parallel running, Microsoft Ads is generating a modest but consistently profitable share of total leads at a lower blended cost than continuing to push additional budget into an increasingly saturated Google Ads account alone, and the company now treats the platform as a permanent, if smaller, part of its overall search budget rather than a one-time experiment worth abandoning once the initial novelty wears off.

Microsoft Audience Network: Native Ads Beyond Search

Beyond search, the Microsoft Audience Network places native-style ads across Microsoft’s own properties, MSN, Outlook.com, and the Microsoft Edge new tab page, along with a range of premium publisher partners. These ads blend into the surrounding content more naturally than a traditional banner, often achieving stronger engagement than equivalent display placements elsewhere, since native ad formats generally suffer less from the banner blindness that affects conventional display advertising. For Indian businesses with an existing remarketing audience built from Search campaign traffic, layering Audience Network placements provides a lower-cost way to stay visible to past visitors across Microsoft’s ecosystem, complementing the Google Display remarketing already covered in our remarketing guide rather than duplicating it, since the audiences reached differ meaningfully by platform and device ecosystem.

In-Market Audiences and Remarketing on Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Ads supports its own version of in-market audiences, targeting people actively researching a product category, and remarketing lists built from your UET tag data, functioning similarly in concept to Google’s equivalent tools but drawing on Microsoft’s own separate data about user behavior across Bing, Windows, and Microsoft 365 properties. Combining Microsoft’s in-market audiences with Search campaigns, similar to RLSA on Google Ads, lets you bid more aggressively when a search comes from someone already showing category-level purchase intent based on their broader Microsoft ecosystem activity, a signal source genuinely distinct from Google’s own in-market audience data since it draws from a different underlying user base and browsing context, giving advertisers a second, independent read on category-level purchase intent rather than relying on a single data provider’s view of the same shopper.

Ad Extensions and Ad Copy Best Practices

Microsoft Ads supports the same core ad extension types familiar from Google Ads, sitelinks, callouts, structured snippets, and call extensions, and using them consistently improves ad visibility and click-through rate in much the same way as on Google. When importing campaigns from Google Ads, verify that extensions imported correctly and display properly within Microsoft Ads’ preview tool, since formatting or character limit differences between the two platforms occasionally cause an extension to display incompletely or not at all. Writing ad copy that references credibility signals, years in business, certifications, client counts, tends to perform particularly well on Microsoft Ads given the platform’s skew toward professional and enterprise searchers who often weigh credibility signals more heavily than a purely price-focused message, particularly for higher-consideration B2B and professional service purchases where trust matters more than the lowest advertised price.

Understanding Quality Score on Microsoft Ads

Microsoft Ads uses its own Quality Score system, calculated similarly in principle to Google’s, factoring in expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience, but calculated independently rather than inherited from your Google Ads account’s own Quality Score history. This means a keyword with a strong Quality Score on Google Ads does not automatically carry that same score into Microsoft Ads, and building Quality Score on the new platform takes its own accumulation period of genuine performance data. Focusing early campaign effort on tight keyword-to-ad-copy relevance, rather than broad, loosely matched campaigns, helps build stronger Quality Scores faster on Microsoft Ads specifically, lowering effective CPCs over time as the platform’s own algorithm gains confidence in your account’s relevance and performance history, much the same way Quality Score compounds favorably on Google Ads once an account has established a solid performance track record.

Measuring Microsoft Ads Performance Alongside Google Ads

Track Microsoft Ads performance in a unified view alongside Google Ads rather than in complete isolation, since the real business question is usually which platform delivers a better cost per conversion for a given keyword or category, not how either platform performs in an absolute vacuum. Cross-referencing conversion data in Google Analytics 4, which can track traffic and conversions from Microsoft Ads alongside every other channel, gives a consistent measurement framework across both platforms rather than relying on each platform’s own, sometimes inconsistently defined, conversion reporting. Reviewing blended cost per lead across both search platforms monthly, rather than treating them as entirely separate budgets and separate success criteria, clarifies where incremental search budget is best allocated as both accounts mature over time, rather than defaulting spend increases to whichever platform simply happens to be top of mind that quarter.

Device and Demographic Skew: Why Bing’s Audience Converts Differently

Bing’s search traffic skews more heavily toward desktop devices than Google’s increasingly mobile-dominated search traffic, largely because Bing remains the default search engine on Windows via Edge, meaning a meaningful share of Bing searches happen on work computers during business hours rather than on personal mobile devices during leisure time. This has practical implications for ad strategy: desktop searchers are often further along in a research or purchase process, more likely to be at work in a professional capacity, and more likely to complete a multi-step form or a higher-consideration purchase in a single session compared to a mobile searcher who may be browsing more casually between other tasks. Businesses selling B2B services, enterprise software, or professional services often find this demographic skew works distinctly in their favor, since their buyer persona, a working professional researching a business purchase on a company laptop, maps closely onto Bing’s actual user base, an alignment that is worth deliberately testing rather than assuming based on Google Ads performance alone, since a channel’s audience composition can matter as much as its raw cost per click, and a lower CPC on a poorly matched audience is rarely a better outcome than a higher CPC on an audience that genuinely resembles your best customers.

Budget Allocation Strategy Between Google and Microsoft Ads

Most Indian businesses should not split search budget evenly between Google and Microsoft Ads, since the two platforms differ enormously in available search volume, Google’s search share in India dwarfs Bing’s by a wide margin across virtually every device category and demographic segment, and forcing an even split would either starve Google Ads of budget it could productively spend or force Microsoft Ads into an unrealistically large budget relative to its actual available traffic. A more practical starting allocation for most businesses testing Microsoft Ads for the first time is a modest ten to twenty percent of total search budget, scaled up over time only if the cost-per-conversion data genuinely justifies further investment relative to continuing to scale Google Ads instead. Reviewing this allocation quarterly, alongside the other budget allocation decisions discussed in our remarketing guide, keeps search spend responsive to which platform is actually delivering better returns rather than following a fixed ratio set once and never revisited as market conditions and account performance evolve. Businesses that treat this as a living allocation, rather than a set-and-forget decision made once during initial setup, consistently extract more value from their combined search budget over the following year than those who simply pick a split and leave it unexamined.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should I use Microsoft Ads instead of Google Ads?
No, treat it as a complementary addition rather than a replacement. Google’s much larger search share in India means Google Ads should remain the primary search channel for most businesses, with Microsoft Ads adding incremental, often cheaper, reach on top.

How long does it take to import a Google Ads account into Microsoft Ads?
The import itself typically completes within minutes to a few hours depending on account size, though reviewing and adjusting bids and tracking afterward is worth budgeting proper time for rather than launching the imported campaigns unchanged.

Is Microsoft Ads worth it for a small business with a limited budget?
Often yes, precisely because the lower competition means a smaller budget can achieve more competitive ad positions than the same budget would on Google Ads, making it a reasonable option even for businesses that cannot yet afford to compete heavily on Google.

Does Microsoft Ads support Shopping campaigns for e-commerce?
Yes, Microsoft Shopping campaigns work similarly to Google Shopping and can often import an existing product feed, making it a relatively low-effort addition for e-commerce businesses already maintaining a Google Merchant Center feed.

Does Microsoft Ads support Performance Max like Google Ads?
Yes, Microsoft Ads offers its own Performance Max campaign type, spanning Search, Audience Network, and Shopping placements from a single automated campaign, mirroring Google’s approach for advertisers who prefer a goal-based, less hands-on setup over manually structured campaigns.

Can I use the same landing pages for Microsoft Ads as Google Ads?
Yes, there is no platform-specific landing page requirement, and using the same conversion-optimized landing pages already proven on Google Ads is generally the right starting point rather than building separate pages, though tracking should be verified to correctly attribute conversions from each platform separately, since a shared landing page does not automatically mean shared or correctly separated conversion counting between the two ad accounts.

Want help testing Microsoft Ads alongside your existing Google Ads account? Apply for a free consultation with the My Advisers team.

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