Bing Ads vs Google Ads: Real CPC Data From 16 Accounts

Microsoft Advertising search CPC across the accounts we manage ranged from $0.82 to $7.71 over the last twelve months. There is no single Bing CPC, and almost every published Bing Ads vs Google Ads comparison is measuring the wrong number on both sides. Here is the data and the method, so you can run the same check on your own account.

On this page

• Methodology and limitations
• Is Bing Ads cheaper than Google Ads?
• Why the usual comparison gets it wrong
• Bing Ads vs Microsoft Ads: which name is correct?
• How Bing Ads works now that it is Microsoft Advertising
• What Bing Shopping ads cost
• What Microsoft Advertising costs to run
• Does cheaper traffic mean cheaper customers?
• Microsoft Ads vs Google Ads in our accounts
• When Microsoft Advertising is not worth it
• How to run this check on your own account
• Frequently asked questions

Methodology and Limitations

This is a first-party study. Every figure comes from advertising accounts we manage directly, not from a survey, a scrape or a third-party estimate.

Window. 11 September 2025 to 10 September 2026, applied identically on both platforms.

Sample. Sixteen accounts in total. Eight carry Microsoft Advertising search data on the matched window. Eight more were analysed for network composition. Verticals include business cheque printing, business envelopes, industrial coatings, door hardware, engraved gifts, textiles, pet products, driver training and food ecommerce. Client names are withheld and replaced with vertical labels, because several are under non-disclosure agreements.

What is counted. Search network only, unless a figure is explicitly labelled blended. This distinction turns out to be the whole story, and the next section explains why.

What this is not. Sixteen accounts is a sample, not an industry benchmark. It skews toward United States ecommerce and business-to-business, because that is what we run. Treat the ranges as a reality check against the single-number claims you will find elsewhere, not as a universal average. Where our platform comparison figures are still on a provisional basis, we say so in the section itself rather than in a footnote.

Is Bing Ads Cheaper Than Google Ads?

The honest answer is that it depends on the account, and the spread is much wider than the question assumes.

Across eight accounts on the matched window, Microsoft Advertising search cost per click looked like this.

That is a nine-fold spread between the cheapest and the dearest account, on the same platform, in the same year, managed by the same team.

The business-to-business accounts at the top of that table are the interesting ones. Cheque printing and business envelopes run at $6.37 to $7.71 per search click on Microsoft. Nobody writing “Bing clicks cost a fraction of Google clicks” has those accounts in mind, and yet they are ordinary businesses buying ordinary commercial keywords.

So when someone tells you Bing PPC is cheaper, the useful reply is: cheaper for which vertical, on which network, measured how?

Why Does the Usual Comparison Get It Wrong?

Because both platforms report a blended average that mixes search clicks with much cheaper inventory, and almost every published comparison uses that blended figure on both sides.

Microsoft reports across five distribution types: Microsoft Sites and Select Traffic, which is real search, plus Syndicated Search Partners, the Microsoft Audience Network, cross-network and AOL Search. Google does the equivalent, pooling Google Search with search partners, the Display Network, cross-network inventory from Performance Max, YouTube, Discover and Gmail.

When we separated those networks across eight accounts, the composition was stark.

Only 29% of Microsoft clicks came from actual Microsoft search. Across 281,296 clicks, just 85,810 were bought on Microsoft Sites and Select Traffic. Almost three quarters of the spend went to audience, cross-network and syndicated partner inventory.

That inventory is cheaper, so it pulls the reported average down and makes the platform look less expensive than its search auction actually is.

Blended understated the true search cost in five of eight accounts, by as much as 184%. In the three where it went the other way, audience inventory happened to be dearer than search, which is its own useful signal about how that budget was being spent.

The practical consequence is simple. If you compare a blended Microsoft number against a blended Google number, you are comparing two differently contaminated averages and calling the difference a finding.

The Syndicated Partner Signature

One pattern showed up repeatedly and is worth knowing how to spot.

On three accounts, syndicated search partner traffic recorded click-through rates of 15% to 16%, against 2% to 6% on core Microsoft search, at roughly a quarter of the cost per click. Portfolio-wide the partner network ran 7.91% CTR against 2.86% on real search.

A click-through rate that far above the core network, at a fraction of the price, is not a bargain. It is the fingerprint of low-intent placements. This is why our guide to excluding Microsoft syndicated search partners treats exclusion as a default rather than an optimisation, and now there is account data behind the recommendation rather than just a principle.

Bing Ads vs Microsoft Ads: Which Name Is Correct?

Microsoft Advertising is the current name. Bing Ads was retired as a brand, though the platform still serves ads on Bing, and most advertisers still say Bing PPC out of habit. You will also still see the older names in circulation: adCenter, Bing AdWords, and Yahoo and Bing advertising, which dates from the search alliance era when the two networks shared inventory.

None of that is pedantry, because the naming confusion causes a real measurement problem. Microsoft Advertising now covers considerably more than Bing search results: the Microsoft Audience Network, syndicated search partners, LinkedIn profile targeting, Microsoft Shopping through Merchant Center, and placements across Microsoft properties including MSN.

So when someone quotes you a Bing CPC, ask which of those they are describing. As the table above shows, the answer changes the number by up to 184%.

How Does Bing Ads Work Now That It Is Microsoft Advertising?

Mechanically it is close enough to Google that anyone who has run a paid search account will recognise it. You bid on keywords in an auction, quality and bid determine position, and the same campaign types exist: search, shopping, audience and performance-oriented automated formats.

Three differences decide whether your account performs.

Yes, Bing has display ads. The Microsoft Audience Network serves native display placements across MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Edge and partner sites. It is enabled by default on many campaign types, it is much cheaper per click than search, and it is the single largest reason account averages look artificially low. Call-only ads exist too, alongside the standard search formats and the full set of Bing ad extensions. If you want a clean read on search cost, exclude the Audience Network in Microsoft Ads before you measure anything.

Syndicated search partners are separate from Microsoft search. Microsoft distributes ads to partner search engines and properties. You cannot opt out entirely, but you can contain the damage with account-level website exclusion lists and campaign-level distribution settings.

Shopping runs on a feed you should not simply mirror. Microsoft Shopping through Merchant Center accepts your Google feed, but a supplemental feed with Bing-length titles, Offer Highlights and custom labels consistently outperforms a straight copy.

If you are setting an account up from scratch, the build sequence and the full checklist are in our Bing Ads management guide, and the platform walkthrough is in our guide to advertising on Bing.

What Do Bing Shopping Ads Cost Compared to Google Shopping?

Shopping deserves its own answer, because the cost gap behaves differently from search.

Microsoft Shopping ads, still widely called Bing Shopping ads, run through Microsoft Merchant Center rather than the keyword auction. You are bidding on a product feed, so your cost per click is decided by feed quality, product titles and competitive density in your category rather than by keyword bids.

Three things we see consistently across the ecommerce accounts in this sample.

The auction is thinner, so the ceiling is lower. Fewer retailers bother to set up a Bing product feed at all, which means less competition on the same SKUs. In our ecommerce accounts Shopping CPC sat below the search CPC on the same account more often than not.

An imported Google feed is the most common reason Bing Shopping underperforms. Microsoft Merchant Center will happily ingest your Google feed, and it will also inherit every Google-optimised title length and attribute choice that does not suit Microsoft’s shorter display. A supplemental feed is not a nice-to-have.

Free product listings change the maths. Microsoft Merchant Center serves unpaid product listings alongside the paid ones, so a properly maintained feed earns visibility that your Shopping CPC never gets charged for. That does not appear anywhere in a cost-per-click comparison, and it is a real part of the return.

Judge Bing Shopping on cost per order against your margin, not on the click price. A category with a thin auction and a clean feed can produce a cost per order well below the search side of the same account. Feed problems are the usual blocker before any of that is testable, and our Silicon Lightworks Merchant Center case study shows what fixing the foundation first looks like.

What Does Microsoft Advertising Actually Cost to Run?

Three separate costs get confused in most conversations about Bing Ads pricing, and separating them settles most arguments about whether advertising on Bing is expensive.

Cost per click. $0.82 to $7.71 across our accounts on search, driven mainly by vertical and commercial intent rather than by the platform. That is the real cost of advertising on Bing, and it is a range rather than a number.

Minimum viable ad spend. You can test Microsoft properly from roughly $500 to $1,000 per month. Microsoft budgets typically run at 10% to 30% of the equivalent Google budget for the same business, which is what makes it a low-risk incremental channel rather than a replacement.

Management fee. A separate question entirely, covered in our PPC management pricing guide with fair fee bands at every spend level.

Judge the channel on the first two and the agency on the third. Conflating them is how people conclude a channel is expensive when what they actually bought was an expensive retainer.

Does Cheaper Traffic Mean Cheaper Customers?

Not automatically, and this is where most platform comparisons stop too early.

A cheaper click that does not convert is not a saving. The number that decides whether a channel earns its place is cost per acquired customer measured against break-even ROAS built from your real margins, not cost per click. Our free ROAS calculator works that number out in a few seconds if you do not already have it.

Two accounts of ours show what that looks like when the channel does work.

A commercial flooring brand reached 10.9x ROAS on Microsoft Advertising, with one campaign at 16.2x, after the account was rebuilt natively instead of left as an imported copy of its Google campaigns.

Running both platforms together, ArmorPoxy generated $1.58M at 12.84x ROAS across multi-platform PPC. That account is the more useful reference for this article, because Google and Microsoft ran side by side in the same business, on the same products, with the same margin targets. The comparison was not theoretical.

Microsoft Ads vs Google Ads: How the Two Compared in Our Accounts

Provisional. The figures in this section were pulled on a full account-history basis rather than the matched twelve-month window used everywhere else in this study. They are directionally sound and we will update them when the matched pull is complete. We are publishing them now with that caveat rather than holding a useful finding back.

On four accounts where the same client ran both platforms, we isolated search-network CPC on each side.

Two accounts where Microsoft was substantially cheaper. Two where it was substantially dearer. A coin flip, from real like-for-like data.

Google’s blended reporting distorts in exactly the same direction as Microsoft’s. On the driver training account, Google reported a blended CPC of $0.65 while its actual Google Search CPC was $2.55, a 292% understatement caused by cross-network Performance Max clicks bought at $0.27. Neither platform’s headline average describes its search auction.

Feature Comparison: Where the Two Platforms Actually Differ

Cost is only half the decision. These are the differences that change how an account is built.

The LinkedIn targeting row is the one most business-to-business advertisers miss. Layering company size, job function or industry onto a Microsoft search campaign has no direct Google equivalent, and on the expensive business-to-business accounts in our sample it is a large part of why a $7 click can still produce a workable cost per lead.

When Is Microsoft Advertising Not Worth It?

Three situations, stated plainly, because a study that only produces convenient conclusions is not worth reading.

When your total budget is too small to split. Below roughly $1,000 per month in ad spend, dividing attention across two platforms usually produces two accounts with insufficient conversion data rather than one account that works.

When nobody will rebuild the account. The import button copies your Google campaigns into Microsoft in minutes. It also copies assumptions that do not hold: different audience composition, different device mix, different partner inventory. An account left as an import is where the disappointing Bing results in most people’s experience actually come from. Our Bing Ads management guide sets out the native build we use instead, and the Bing Ads optimization checklist is what we work through afterwards.

When your buyer is not there. Microsoft’s audience skews older and more desktop-weighted. That is an advantage for business-to-business, trade supply and considered purchases, and a disadvantage for products that sell to a young mobile-first audience.

How to Run This Check on Your Own Account

You do not need our data to answer the question for your business. You need twenty minutes and your own.

In Microsoft Advertising, open Reports, choose the Account template, set your date range, then segment or filter by Ad distribution and read the Search row on its own. Ignore the account average.

In Google Ads, set the identical date range, then segment by Network with search partners and read the Google Search row on its own.

Compare those two numbers, not the account averages. Then do it again with cost per conversion instead of cost per click, because that is the number that pays your invoices.

If the two search figures are close, platform choice is a distribution question rather than a cost question. If they diverge sharply, you have found a real budget decision, and you found it in your own account rather than in someone’s blog post.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bing Ads cheaper than Google Ads?

Sometimes, and not reliably. Across four accounts where we ran both platforms and compared search networks like for like, Microsoft was substantially cheaper in two and substantially more expensive in two. The vertical and the auction matter more than the platform.

How much does Bing Ads cost per click?

Across our accounts, Microsoft search CPC ranged from $0.82 to $7.71 over twelve months. Business-to-business verticals such as cheque printing and business envelopes sat at the top of that range, general ecommerce toward the bottom. Any single published average hides a nine-fold spread.

Why is my reported Bing CPC lower than what I see in the search results?

Because your account average includes Audience Network, cross-network and syndicated partner clicks, which are much cheaper than search. In our sample only 29% of Microsoft clicks came from actual Microsoft search. Filter to search alone and the real number usually rises sharply.

Are Bing Ads worth it in 2026?

Worth testing if you have at least $500 to $1,000 a month to allocate and someone willing to build the account natively. Not worth it if the plan is to press import and hope, or if your total budget is too small to support two platforms.

What is the difference between Bing Ads and Microsoft Ads?

They are the same platform under different names. Microsoft Advertising is the current brand, Bing Ads is the retired one. The current platform reaches well beyond Bing search results, which is exactly why blended cost figures mislead.

Should I advertise on Bing if Google is already working?

Usually yes, as an incremental channel rather than a replacement. Microsoft budgets typically run at 10% to 30% of the equivalent Google budget, so the test is cheap. Build it natively, exclude syndicated partners at the start, and judge it on cost per conversion after ninety days.

How do I compare Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads fairly?

Isolate the search network on both sides and use an identical date range. Blended account averages are contaminated on both platforms, in the same direction, which is why most published comparisons are not measuring what they claim to measure.

Does Bing have display ads?

Yes, through the Microsoft Audience Network. It serves native display placements across MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Edge and partner sites, and it is enabled by default on several campaign types. Those clicks are far cheaper than search clicks, which is precisely why they drag the reported account average down.

Do Bing Shopping ads cost less than Google Shopping ads?

Usually yes, because far fewer retailers maintain a Bing product feed, so the auction is thinner on the same SKUs. Cost is set by feed quality and category competition rather than keyword bids, and Microsoft Merchant Center also serves free product listings that a cost-per-click comparison never captures. Judge it on cost per order against your margin.

How much does it cost to advertise on Bing for a small business?

Budget $500 to $1,000 per month in ad spend to run a fair test. At the CPCs in our sample that buys anywhere from roughly 65 clicks a month in an expensive business-to-business auction to more than 1,000 in a cheap ecommerce one, which is why the test period matters more than the budget headline.

How do I run ads on Bing if I already have a Google Ads account?

You can import your Google campaigns in minutes, and you should treat that import as scaffolding rather than a finished account. Rebuild negatives, contain the Audience Network, validate UET conversion tracking, reset device and demographic modifiers, and replace the Shopping feed with a supplemental one before you judge the results.

Is Microsoft Advertising worth it for business to business?

Often yes, despite the higher click price. The most expensive accounts in our sample were business-to-business, at $6.37 to $7.71 per search click, and they are also the ones where the audience skew toward older, desktop-based, work-context searchers does the most good. Judge it on cost per qualified lead, not cost per click.

Where to Go From Here

If you want the underlying method rather than the headline, our performance benchmark report documents how we publish account data, and the Reporting Integrity Standard sets out the seven commitments behind every number on this site.

If you would rather someone else ran the check, our Bing Ads management team will audit your Microsoft account against this method, and you can see how the wider market compares in our roundup of the best Bing Ads agencies. Agencies reselling the channel under their own brand can do the same through our white label PPC programme. If you would rather bring in one person than an agency, we also place a Bing Ads consultant directly onto your account.

About the Author

Ishant Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hustle Marketers, a Google Partner, Meta Business Partner and Microsoft Advertising Partner agency with $780M+ in tracked client revenue across 2,500+ brands over twelve years. He has audited more than 700 advertising accounts and publishes the method behind every figure the agency reports.