Bing Ads vs Google Ads for a Local Business

For most local businesses, the answer to Bing Ads vs Google Ads is both, in that order: keep Google Ads as the main channel and run Microsoft Ads (the new name for Bing Ads) as a small side test. Bing is a desktop search engine. StatCounter puts it at 12.82% of US desktop searches in August 2026, but just 1.81% of mobile searches, where Google has 93.51%. If your customers call you from their phone in a panic, Bing will never be the main source. If they research a bigger job from a desk, it can be a cheap second source.

The question usually comes up because Google got expensive. In one r/PPC thread, the owner of a small local financial firm whose clients are mostly over 40 put it plainly: "I just don't have the margin to compete for $30+ CPCs." If that sounds familiar, first check whether you are paying for fake leads and bot clicks on Google before you move money anywhere.

Bing Ads vs Google Ads: the short answer

Google Ads is the default for a local service business; Microsoft Ads is worth a controlled test when your buyers search from a computer.

Choose Google Ads first if:

• Most jobs start with a phone search: emergencies, same-day service, "near me".
• You need volume. Bing's reach runs out fast in a single city.
• You want Local Services Ads, Maps placement and call-first ad formats in one place.

Add Microsoft Ads as a test if:

• Customers research the job on a computer: remodels, legal, accounting, insurance, financial planning, B2B services.
• Your Google cost per lead is climbing and you only need a few more clients a month.
• Your Google search campaign already works. Bing copies a good campaign well and a bad one faithfully.

Do not bother yet if: you cannot tell which leads came from which platform, or you have no time to check search terms weekly.

Head-to-head comparison

Microsoft's help pages list where its search ads run: Bing, AOL, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and other partners, which is why Yahoo and DuckDuckGo count on the Microsoft side.

How many of your customers actually search on Bing?

Somewhere between 2% and 16% of your searchers, depending on whether they are on a phone or a computer. The two numbers usually quoted measure different things.

Microsoft's advertising site says its network has a 39.1% share of US PC searches, with 10.1 billion monthly PC searches and 186 million unique PC users. The footnote matters: Comscore data, December 2025, "desktop traffic only", and it counts Microsoft's whole network, not just bing.com.

StatCounter measures page views across all devices and puts Bing alone at 8.92% of US search. On desktop, that rises to 12.82%. On mobile, Bing falls to 1.81%, behind DuckDuckGo and Yahoo. Canada looks similar: 9.56% overall and 15.89% on desktop.

So the real question for you is: what share of your leads come from desktop? Check your own analytics for the last 90 days of enquiries. An emergency trade whose calls are mostly mobile is fishing in the 1.81% pond; a remodeller or bookkeeper whose customers fill out forms at a desk is fishing in the 12.82% one. One r/PPC commenter who has run both for years said they had "never found Microsoft to have more than 5% of the market share" in the accounts they manage, which is a fair real-world middle.

Is the Bing audience really older?

A little, but not the way comparison posts describe it. Nearly every page ranking for this question says Bing users are "older and more affluent". Microsoft's own audience data for the US tells a more modest story: 54% of people on its search network are under the age of 45, 49% graduated from college, and 41% have household income in the top 25%.

That is a slightly older, slightly better-off audience, not a retirement community. The stronger skew is device: home and office PCs.

Owners should also hear the less flattering take. One r/PPC advertiser wrote that many of their Bing leads "believe they found me on Google" because they never changed the default browser, and called them "super price sensitive" and "my most difficult new clients". Another in the same thread had a client selling bikes for seniors for whom "Bing is huge". Both can be true in different trades. Your own close rate settles it.

Are Bing clicks actually cheaper?

Often, yes, but nobody ranking for this question can source how much cheaper, and cheaper clicks can still cost you more per job. The claims on page 1 range from "30-50% lower" to "30-70% cheaper", and the one that links anywhere points to a WordStream study from 2017. Microsoft does not publish an average cost per click.

What we can source is the Google side. WordStream's 2025 Google Ads benchmarks put the average cost per click for Home and Home Improvement at $7.85, up 13.95% year over year, with an average conversion rate of 7.33% and an average cost per lead of $90.92. That is the bar a Bing test has to beat.

The catch shows up in the r/PPC thread again. The most detailed answer came from an advertiser who runs both: "Often what you'll find is the CPCs are lower but so are the conversion rates so it sort of balances out." Another commenter said it more bluntly: "Sometimes the cheaper clicks are genuinely better. Sometimes they're just cheaper. The only way to know is to track them through to revenue."

Google Ads vs Microsoft Ads, side by side

1. Google Ads

Best for: any local service business where customers search on their phone, especially urgent jobs.

Pricing: pay per click. Home and home improvement clicks averaged $7.85 in 2025 per WordStream's benchmarks.

Google Ads covers Search, Maps and search partners, and sits alongside Local Services Ads for many trades. It has the volume to feed a crew all year.

Pros: the most searches by far, especially mobile; call-first formats; mature conversion tracking.

Cons: the highest CPCs; automated settings that expand spend quickly. If a rep is pushing changes, read our take on whether to let a Google Ads rep optimize your account first.

Our verdict: the main channel. If it is not working, fix it before adding another platform, because Bing will copy the problem.

2. Microsoft Ads (Bing Ads)

Best for: businesses whose buyers research on a computer and who only need a handful of extra clients a month.

Pricing: pay per click, no official average published. The savings people report are anecdotes, not benchmarks.

Microsoft Ads serves search ads on Bing, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. You can import campaigns directly from Google Ads, and Microsoft allows location targeting and ad schedules at the ad group level, which a Microsoft product liaison highlighted in a video walkthrough with Google Ads coach Jyll Saskin Gales as a way to run fewer campaigns.

Pros: often cheaper clicks; less competition in many local markets; fast setup from an existing Google account.

Cons: low volume that caps out quickly; more partner and bot traffic when left on defaults; a smaller help and support ecosystem.

Our verdict: a good second channel for desktop-heavy businesses, run as a test with tight settings.

The settings that waste a local budget on Microsoft Ads

Most bad Bing results come from four defaults, not from Bing itself. Fix these before you judge the platform.

1. The automatic import schedule. Microsoft's own help page warns that automated imports keep running "at the frequency you set, reactivating the campaigns and modifying the settings back to what they are on Google Ads (including the budget)." Pause a Bing campaign, and the next scheduled import can switch it back on at Google's budget. For a small account, do a one-time import, then turn the schedule off. Auto-generated assets are not imported, so check every ad.

2. Ad distribution. Microsoft's recommended setting is the entire Microsoft Advertising Network, which adds "additional partner traffic" for "lower cost per click". Some of those partner sites "are reported in aggregate", so you cannot see them one by one. Switch each ad group to Microsoft sites and select traffic, then run the Website URL (publisher) report and exclude anything that sends clicks but no calls.

3. Location targeting. Microsoft offers two options: people in your area, or people "in, searching for, or viewing webpages about" your area. Google recommends its broader version, "Presence or Interest", as a best practice on Search. For a business with a fixed service area, pick "people in" on both platforms. If you are already seeing leads from outside your service area, this is usually the reason. Microsoft also notes that location targeting "may not always work" because of device settings and geolocation limits, so check the geographic report anyway.

4. Match types. The top comment (47 points) in an r/PPC thread titled "First time Microsoft Ads" read: "Don't use broad match. Exclude the audience network and search partners as much as you can. Have much lower budgets on Microsoft... Don't have auto imports from Google." Start with exact and phrase match on your proven keywords. Our guide to broad match keywords explains why.

One more risk: an r/PPC advertiser imported working Google campaigns and wrote that "2 hours later my account was suspended", appeal upheld. One anecdote, but a reason to start with a small, clean import.

How to run a fair 60-day Bing test

Give Microsoft Ads a fixed slice of budget, your best keywords and 60 days, then compare cost per booked job on both platforms. Here is the test, step by step.

1. Pick the campaign. Import only your best Google search campaign, not Performance Max and not display.
2. Set the budget. Put 10% to 30% of that campaign's Google budget on Microsoft. One r/PPC advertiser who runs both usually lands near "70% on Google and 30% on MS". Another said Microsoft "can/will typically produce similar CPAs to Google at about 25-40% of the budget." Both are anecdotes.
3. Tighten the defaults. One-time import only, Microsoft sites and select traffic, "people in" location, exact and phrase match, no audience network.
4. Keep bidding simple. A commenter identifying as a Microsoft employee wrote that automated bidding needs about "30 conversions in 30 days" to work, and that "budget changes of more than 15% can trigger learning periods." A small local account will not hit that quickly, so change budgets in small steps.
5. Track every lead by platform. Use a separate tracking number for Bing ads and tag forms with the source. Our guide to tracking where your leads come from covers the setup, and the call tracking software roundup covers the tools.
6. Check search terms weekly. Add negatives for anything that is not a real job.
7. Compare at day 60. Not clicks, not form fills: booked jobs and revenue.

The break-even check

Cheaper clicks only save money if the conversion rate does not fall as fast. Cost per lead changes by the CPC ratio divided by the conversion rate ratio. Using WordStream's $90.92 average Google cost per lead for home and home improvement as the baseline:

Then add close rate. If Google leads close 1 in 3, a Google job costs about $273 in ad spend. If Bing leads cost $64.94 but close 1 in 4, a Bing job costs about $260. That saving is real but small, and it disappears if Bing leads are more price sensitive, as one advertiser reported. If you do not know your close rate by source, that is the first leak to fix, and it is one of the places we look when owners ask where their business is losing money.

What owners in r/PPC actually chose

The consensus in the threads we read was "test, don't transition". In the 34-comment r/PPC thread about moving a small local firm from Google to Bing, the replies lined up:

• "I would test Microsoft Ads, not transition to it." The same commenter added: "use a budget small enough that bad traffic cannot teach you an expensive lesson."
• "Bing is great, amazing cost of acquisition, issue is the volume is not the same. But definitely worth running in parallel to Google."
• "I'm actually directing a lot of my local business clients to Bing Ads these days. The search volume is way lower than Google, but more customers are using it than you might think."

The original poster's reply is the clearest framing for any small local business: "I need higher ROAS more than I need volume." If that is you, Bing is worth a test. If you need volume to keep a crew busy, it will not replace Google.

On lead quality, an advertiser in a 2023 r/PPC thread reported "pretty good results in terms of CPA" on Microsoft, but "yes more fake leads in general than with Google Ads." That is why speed and qualification matter: fake leads waste the most time when you respond to every lead at the same speed, with no check on whether they are real.

Deeper answers

Should I pause Google Ads and move everything to Bing?

Almost never. Google has 93.51% of US mobile searches, where urgent local jobs start, and Bing is too small to fill a schedule. If Google has become unaffordable, ask whether search ads fit your budget at all, which we cover in whether Google Ads is worth it on a small budget. If your results dropped suddenly, start with why Google Ads stopped working.

Does Bing Places matter if I only run ads?

Claim it anyway. Bing Places for Business is free, and it controls your listing in Bing search and Bing Maps, the local results that Bing searchers see next to your ads. Microsoft claims more than 140 million daily active Bing users. The same listing hygiene helps with AI search for local businesses, since assistants pull local business data from several sources.

Why does my Bing traffic convert worse than Google?

Usually partner traffic you did not choose, broad location settings, or a landing page built for mobile searchers. Check the publisher report, then the geographic report, then the page. Our guide to website conversion rate covers what to fix on the page.

Can I run the Bing test myself?

Yes, if you already manage your own Google Ads and can spare 30 minutes a week for search terms and tracking. It stops being worth doing when you cannot tell which platform a call came from, because then it is a lead system problem, not an ad platform problem.

How we compared the two platforms

We judged Google Ads and Microsoft Ads on five things that matter to a local service business with 1 to 30 people:

• Reach on the devices your customers use. A cheap click on a platform they never open is worthless.
• Cost per booked job. Close rates decide whether cheap clicks pay.
• Control over where ads show. Local budgets cannot absorb partner and bot traffic.
• Upkeep time. An owner-run account needs settings that stay put.
• Tracking. If you cannot attribute a lead to a platform, you cannot compare platforms.

Go deeper

• Google Ads fake leads and bot clicks: spot junk leads before moving budget.
• Tracking where your leads come from: the setup a two-platform test needs.
• Leads from outside your service area: the settings behind out-of-area calls.
• Google Local Services Ads for contractors: Google's pay-per-lead option.

How to pick

If your jobs start with a phone search, Google Ads is your channel and Bing is a rounding error. If your customers research from a desk and you only need a few more clients a month, give Microsoft Ads 60 days, a small budget and tight settings, then keep it only if its cost per booked job beats Google's.