How Much Do Bing Ads Cost? Are They Worth It?

So you want to advertise with Bing and want to learn how much do Bing Ads Cost?

Done deal.

In this article I’m going to talk a bit about the factors that affect the cost of Bing Ads.

Even though Bing is not as popular as Google in terms of search engine traffic, according to SimilarWeb they still average about 1 Billion visitors a month from top countries like the US, Canada, Germany, Japan and more.

So you should also focus on optimizing your content for the Bing search engine but not only that, you should try out their ads network, officially known as Microsoft Advertising.

As you know, I’m a very vocal supporter of the Microsoft Advertising network, and I’m also partnered with them to bring you guys awesome promo deals like:

Which means that when it comes to Bing ads, I know a thing or two 😉

So… without dragging this post too much, let’s get on with it.

Factors that affect Bing Ads cost

There are quite a few factors that will affect how much Bing Ads cost.

You have to remember that as with any ad network, the cost can be higher or lower depending on the level of competition in the industry you’re advertising.

For example some industries like insurance will have a much higher ad CPC than an industry like gaming.

The competition between the advertisers in a specific industry is one of the main factors when it comes to figuring out how much you will pay per click.

Here are the main factors that can drive up or down the costs of your Bing ads:

Location Advertised

The location you advertise your campaigns and ads plays a huge role in the overall costs of your Microsoft Advertising campaigns.

Naturally, some countries with a higher purchasing power and more searches will have a higher CPC. For example: US, Australia, United Kingdom and Canada.

Advertisers that are looking to get cheaper clicks for their ads, should look to target countries where the competition is not that high. For example: Brazil, India, France, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, etc.

Industry

The industry that you’re advertising in, is one of the main factors when it comes to your Microsoft Advertising costs.

Certain niches are more in demand than others and are more lucrative, and because of that, the competition between advertisers is higher, resulting in a higher cost-per-click (CPC).

Get to see a more detailed view of Bing Ads cost by industry below.

You might find out that your Microsoft Advertising budget will need to be replenished faster if you’re advertising in a niche that’s pretty popular during holidays, for example, gifts, clothes, etc.

But to the same degree, you might see your ad costs be actually lower if you improve your landing page quality and raise your ads CTR, and this is true regardless of the industry you’re advertising in.

Speaking of…

Ads CTR & Landing Page Quality

If you want to enjoy lower Bing Ads costs, you might want to improve your landing page quality and increase your ads CTR.

Creating a high quality landing page that’s closely related to your ads is a must.

Don’t just stick to low content, try to add some bullet points, testimonials, and more details about what it is that you’re promoting.

Make use of keywords and the text from your landing page into your ads, this way you can increase your CTR and as a result get a lower CPC.

So why is that important?

Well, it’s simple actually, Bing, Yahoo, and Google Ads all want the same thing from their advertisers:

To provide users with the most accurate and helpful information.

If your landing page closely reflects your ads then your landing page quality will be higher, and in turn you will be rewarded with a lower cost per click.

Same thing with your ads, make sure to do A/B tests on your PPC ad copy to try and increase your CTR as much as possible.

Search Volume

The number of searches for the keywords that you will target with Bing Ads will also play a factor in the overall total cost of your ads.

If a keyword gets a lot of monthly searches, usually it’s going to be more expensive than keywords that get fewer searches.

Sometimes though, buyer keywords with a low amount of searches could have a higher CPC, but it depends on the industry.

Number of Ads

The amount of campaigns and ads that you are running on the Microsoft Advertising network is also important when it comes to costs.

You see, if you have more ads, that usually means you will have to pay for more clicks.

So the more campaigns, ad groups and ads that you have, the more chances you have to increase your total Bing ads cost.

If you want to run ads on a tighter budget, think about running fewer ads at first with ad groups that have no more than 20-50 keywords each.

Bing Ads Cost – By Industry

In a report done by WordStream, they have analyzed which are the industries with the highest CPC in Bing Ads, and this is what they have found out that:

The average CPC in Bing Ads across all industries is: $1.54

Industries with the highest CPCs are:

• Real estate – Average CPC of $2.88
• Education – Average CPC of $2.79
• Home Improvement – Average CPC of $2.54

Industries with lowest CPCs:

• Careers – Average CPC of $0.75
• Apparel – Average CPC of $0.91
• Home & Garden – Average CPC of $1.01

However, you have to keep in mind that these can drastically change depending on the time and location of your ads.

The conversion rate on Bing Ads is also slightly higher than Google’s. So that’s great to know.

Across all industries WordStream found out that the average conversion rate is 2.94%

I tend to agree with that number from my own personal campaigns that I have done over the years.

Although you have to keep in mind that some niches will do better on Bing simply because of Bing’s demographics.

Bing users have a higher average income, and they also use their desktops a lot more, thus another reason for the higher conversion rate when we compare desktop to mobile traffic.

Types of Bing Ads

Microsoft Advertising has many types of ads that are similar to Google’s. But with the added benefit of being much cheaper.

You should ideally try them all if you want to scale up your campaigns. But before you do that make sure to familiarize yourself with the platform and network first.

Since Microsoft Advertising includes Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and other properties, some type of ads will only be available on certain platforms.

Extended Ads

These are your regular or default text ads that will appear in Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines that are supported by Microsoft Advertising.

Pretty simple to get started with extended ads, all you need is a headline, description and a second description if you want to include more details into your ads.

Sometimes though, less is more…but you should definitely test it out and create 2 variations, one that is shorter and another one that makes use of both description fields.

Responsive Search Ads

This is a new ad type format that you can choose to target audiences on the Bing and Yahoo search network.

They are very easy to set up, all you have to do is add some titles and descriptions and you will instantly generate ads that are combinations and variations of those..

Usually you should create these if you don’t have time to manually create dozens or hundreds of extended ad variations.

App Install Ads

As the title suggests, these are the type of ads that you use when you want to drive traffic from Bing to get installs for your app.

You can either manually upload your APK or direct link to Google or Apple, depending where you’ve published your app.

Shopping Ads

Also known as product ads, these appear in Bing’s main search results and on their shopping tab.

So if you have an e-commerce store, make sure to try out Bing’s shopping ads, so that you can scale your promotion even more.

Dynamic Search Ads

If you have a large store, you can use page feeds to create dynamic search ads automatically.

For example with dynamic ads, Bing will search the pages of your website (that you select), and they will pull out products to show in your search ads that are the most relevant to users.

It’s a pretty cool feature especially if you have a shop with tons of products and don’t want to manually create ads for each and every one of them.

Microsoft Audience Ads

These ads are what we call native ads basically and they will work similar to display ads and be shown on the Edge browser, MSN, Outlook, and more sites from Microsoft Advertising’s Audience Network.

You can quickly scale up your Bing ads campaigns and take it to another level by creating display ads on the Microsoft Audience Network to increase your exposure and get more clicks.

Most of the times the clicks are cheaper than the search ones, so it’s a great idea to test these ads out.

The only downside is that these ads are only available to be created by users with a billing address in the US or UK, at least for the moment.

Bing Smart Search ads

Similar to the regular ads, the Bing Smart Search ads will show your ads across their Windows’ 8.1 search results.

They work exactly the same as they would in the regular search engine.

With a more modern touch though and the ability for the users to preview your landing page directly from the ad, these ad types are another way in which you can use Microsoft Advertising to scale up your traffic.

But the downside is that these ad types are only available for Windows 8.1 in the US, UK, and Canada.

Bid Strategy for Bing Ads

There are 6 types of bid strategies that you can choose from when you’re creating a campaign on the Microsoft Advertising network.

• Enhanced CPC – The first bid option is also the default one. You basically let Microsoft Advertising to make small adjustments to your bid with the goal of automatically bidding higher than the other advertisers to improve conversions and clicks.
• Maximize Clicks – When all you care about is to get a massive amount of traffic to your landing page, then you should use this option and let the system automatically bid the highest to get the most clicks available.
• Maximize Conversions – This one is pretty straightforward, you allow the platform to set your bids automatically in real time so that you can get more conversions.
• Target CPA – If you know your CPA (cost per acquisition) for the past 30 days, then you can set that directly into your Bing ads, and the platform will try to bring you conversions that are as close as possible to your CPA rate.
• Target ROAS – This one is pretty similar to the above bid strategy, but instead of setting a CPA you put the return of ad spent for the past 30 days, and Bing will try to automatically get you clicks and conversions that are in line with that.
• Manual Bidding – If you’re feeling adventurous and want to do it all manually, you can select manual bidding. This way you get to decide exactly how much you want to pay for clicks from the keywords that you’re targeting.

If you’re just starting out advertising on Bing, I would suggest you either set your first bid strategy on Enhanced CPC or go with manual bidding.

As you can see from the above picture, I’m still using Bing Ads to this day (that screenshot was taking yesterday), and I’m showing you a campaign that I have running with enhanced CPC bid strategy.

It manages to get an average CPC of $0.04 which is lower than Bing’s minimum bid of $0.05 lol.

How did I achieve that? Well, like I’ve said before, landing page quality + targeting different other locations not just the U.S>

Bing Ads Metrics & Performance

After you’re done setting up your Microsoft Advertising campaign, you will get to see some metrics and performance reports into your account.

You can create special reports with only the metrics that are of interest to you for specific campaigns only, or you can create them for the whole account for a certain date.

Modifying your columns inside your Microsoft Advertising with some of these important metrics is also pretty handy, because you will be able to quickly see how your campaigns, ad groups and ads are performing.

Here are some important Bing Ads metrics to know:

• Impressions – The total amount of times your ad was shown when people searched for your keywords.
• Ad CTR – The CTR (clickthrough rate) that your ads are getting. The higher the better.
• Conversions – Number of conversions, if you’ve set that up with Microsoft Advertising.
• CPA – The amount of money you spent to get a conversion is known as cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Clicks – This is the number of clicks your ads have received.
• Avg. CPC – How much you have paid for a click on average.
• Average Position – The average position of your ads when competing with other advertisers on the search engine.
• Total Ad Spend – The total amount that you have spent on your ads.
• Revenue – Here you can see the revenue that you’ve made from your ads if you’ve set this up correctly with Microsoft Advertising.
• ROAS – This will show you the percentage of your return on ad spend, ROAS, so the higher this is the more profitable your campaigns are.
• Delivery – Shows you the status of your campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords. Basically, if they are eligible, running or paused, in review or disapproved.
• Bid Match Type – The type of keyword that triggered your ads to be seen: so these are broad, phrase, exact, or broad match modified.
• Quality Score – The quality score is based on your ads’ CTR (click-through rate), relevancy, and landing page experience. The higher this is, the better your campaigns will perform. Usually, if you get a high score you will get to pay less for clicks since your campaign is super optimized. A good campaign has at least a 7 out of 10 score, with 10 being the best of course.
• Device OS – See the operating system of where your ad clicks came from, so mobile, desktop or tablet. You can also target only specific devices like desktop for example by turning down mobile and tablet traffic by 100%.
• Landing Page Experience – How great and relevant your landing page is, this is closely related to the quality score, so the higher this is the better. Make sure you have a great LP.

Bing Ads Promo Code 2022

Update: As of August 2022, Microsoft has ended their promo link offer through partners such as myself, so the links won’t work anymore. If they re-activate this deal again I will make sure to update this post. Sorry folks. Here are other ways to get cheap website traffic

Look, Bing Ads promo codes don’t usually last for too long and they either expire or they get limited to a certain number of people or countries.

I have something even better for you than a Microsoft Advertising promo code. A direct always working promo deal that’s only available through my partner link.

Here’s the thing, I’ve partnered with Bing Ads a while ago to bring you guys one of the best promo deals in the business.

So that’s basically free $100 for you to spend and try out ads on the Microsoft Advertising platform.

The awesome part is that the offer is not limited only to US, or to a few number of users. It has no expiration date, and almost no GEO restrictions.

The only requirements are to never have used Bing Ads before and to open an account through my link, and deposit $25.

Yes, that’s all, and it’s that easy.

I’ve helped thousands of people to get started with Microsoft Advertising through this promo deal, so why don’t you give it a try as well?

Final words

So, there you have it, I hope this article helped you out a bit in figuring out how much do Bing ads cost.

As you can see there are certain factors that will influence your CPCs, and total ad spend, with the most important ones being the industry and the location.

If you’re after cheap website traffic, try and optimize your ads as best as possible and get a high-quality score. Give other locations a try too.

Frequently Asked Questions

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