If you’re going to run pay-per-click campaigns in search, you have two options: Deciding on the right platform for your campaigns is going to depend on your goals and budget for PPC management. When it comes to Google Ads vs Microsoft Ads (or Bing Ads, depending on who you talk to), both can help you
If you’re going to run pay-per-click campaigns in search, you have two options:
Deciding on the right platform for your campaigns is going to depend on your goals and budget for PPC management. When it comes to Google Ads vs Microsoft Ads (or
Bing Ads, depending on who you talk to), both can help you get in front of your ideal audience.
But you need to be sure you’re on the right one. Choosing the wrong option can restrict the success of your campaigns by meaning you’re not targeting the right audience.
In this blog, you’ll learn the difference between Google Ads vs Bing Ads PPC platforms.
Although Google’s market share has been falling in recent years (down 10% since 2018), it’s still by far the dominant search engine globally.
With a global market share of nearly 80%, Google is miles ahead of Microsoft/ Bing’s 12% market share (and Microsoft/Bing has the second highest market share).
But, even with a significantly smaller market share, that 12% on Bing represents around 1.8 billion searches a month.
Google has a higher average cost per click than Bing (some estimates put it at around 33% more expensive to advertise on Google).
This can be explained because the competition is higher on Google. After all, the audience is bigger and more businesses want to advertise on Google.
Having said that, it’s always worth comparing the average cost per click based on your industry.
Both Microsoft Ads vs Google Ads have precise targeting on their platforms, so provided your audience is on the platform you choose, you’ll have plenty of options to
target them effectively.
Google and Bing both have options to target ads based on keywords and search queries.
Both can run retargeting campaigns for known audiences and target users based on demographics, behaviour, interests and location or device.
And both give you the ability to create audiences to improve targeting based on the characteristics of your customer lists.
Essentially, whether the PPC bidding strategy you want, both Google and Bing can help.
But, although both provide lots of options for effective targeting, we’d have to give the edge to Google purely because it has a lot more data available.
Both Google Ads and Bing Ads offer lots of the same ad types, like responsive ads, display ads, shopping ads, and video ads.
Each ad type displays virtually the same in the SERPs you’re using. Here’s an example of Shopping and top search ad listings for the term “men’s running shoes” in Google:
And here’s the same listing results for the same search on Bing:
Both platforms are also leaning heavily into AI and automation, with both launching their version of “Performance Max” campaigns, which use machine learning to improve ad performance by combining ad formats and creative assets into a single campaign to see which performs best.
Again, Google and Bing offer the same types of keyword matches based on your goals.
The Bing Ads vs Google Ads match types you can use are…
On Google, broad match uses searches that include any or all of your keywords to display your ad, regardless of the order they appear.
On Bing, all your keywords need to be present to display your ad, but not necessarily in the same order.
This makes Bing’s broad match setting more restrictive than Google, which can eliminate wasted budget, but can also reduce the number of potential customers you get in front of.
In theory, phrase match works the same on Google and Bing.
But, in reality, we’ve found phrase match behaves a lot more like broad match on Google, bringing in a wider range of searches, not all of them particularly relevant and
needing closer management.
With phrase match, your ads appear provided they include all your chosen keywords in the right order, although other keywords can appear either side of them.
For example, if your keyword is “running trainers”, your phrase match results could include “best running trainers” or “running trainers for 10k”.
This helps get your ads seen by a wider range of people, while retaining a higher degree of relevance than broad match, although as I’ve said, broad and phrase match
behave very similarly on Google.
Again, these work pretty much the same across both Google and Bing, with some slight differences.
The main difference being that Google is more flexible in what it deems to be an “exact match”. With Google, exact match results can include “close variants”, which include
synonyms and misspellings of your keyword.
Bing, on the other hand, tends to stay more strict and will only show ads when searches match the exact keyword or phrase you want to show for.
Both have their pluses and minuses when it comes to control and relevance vs audience exposure, and which is more important will be down to you.
Negative keyword lists are essential in both Google Ads and Bing Ads (I’d maybe argue even more on Google, which can be more flexible with how it interprets keyword
match types).
Negative keywords are any keyword or phrase that you don’t want your ad to appear for, and you can add them to your campaigns as you get more data.
I won’t talk too much about negative PPC keywords here because there’s already a pretty in-depth blog on that topic.
CTR is one of the most important PPC metrics you’ll pay attention to, because this tells you the percentage of people who clicked your ad vs those who saw it.
This is one area where Google has the advantage.
The average click through rate on Google (all industries) is about 3.17%, compared to about 2.83% on Microsoft.
Google also has a higher conversion rate with an average CVR of 3.75% (all industries) compared to Bing’s 2.94%.
Both of these numbers suggest that Google is better at getting clicks and conversions from users.
However, Bing redeems itself when it comes to costs.
Google and Microsoft’s PPC reporting dashboards work very much the same, so you don’t have to worry about a high learning curve if switching between the two.
These dashboards can be modified to display the main information you want to see from your campaigns, whether that’s conversions, CPC, impressions, CTR, CPA or any
other important PPC metric you might want to track.
Example of a Bing PPC reporting dashboard
Example of a Google Ads PPC reporting dashboard
Deciding whether to advertise on Google vs Bing is a big decision that can have big implications for the success of your PPC campaigns.
Both have their significant pros and cons and target a different type of audience, so you’ll need to research where your audience is searching before creating ads.
Even with a lower market share, Microsoft/ Bing provides substantial opportunity to generate leads and sales for your business, at a lower costs than Google.
However, Google remains by far the biggest player in search engine marketing and delivers the highest rates of clicks and conversions from its much bigger audience.
If you have the budget, we’d recommend running campaigns on both Google and Bing to see which delivers the most results.
If you want to get some advice from a professional PPC agency with experience running paid ad campaigns for search engines and social media, then get in touch and claim a free strategy session.
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