Almost every Tampa business we look at runs Google Ads and nothing else. When we ask about Microsoft Ads, the answer is usually some version of "nobody uses Bing." That answer is costing a lot of local companies money, and the ones it costs the most are the B2B firms, the professional services practices and the businesses selling to an older customer.
Microsoft Ads is not going to replace Google. The volume is not there and it never will be. What it does is give you a second source of qualified clicks, in an auction with fewer bidders, using an account you can build in an afternoon by importing the one you already have.
Here is the honest version of how Bing Ads and Microsoft Ads fit into a Tampa advertising budget, including the parts that do not work.
Bing Ads and Microsoft Ads are the same thing
The platform was called Bing Ads until Microsoft renamed it Microsoft Advertising. The search engine is still Bing. If you have an old login, it still works, and everything you knew about the platform still mostly applies.
The reach is broader than the Bing name suggests, because Microsoft’s search network also serves results and ads on partner properties, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo among them. On top of that sits the Microsoft Audience Network, which places native ads across Microsoft-owned properties like MSN and Outlook.com. Microsoft documents all of this in the Microsoft Advertising help center, which is worth twenty minutes of your time before you spend anything.
The other structural thing to know: Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, and Edge is the browser that ships with Windows. A meaningful share of Bing searches happen because somebody opened the browser that was already on their computer and typed into the box. That sounds unflattering. It is also exactly why the audience is worth having.
Where the Tampa opportunity actually comes from
Three things about the Tampa Bay market make Microsoft Ads worth a proper test rather than a shrug.
The corporate desktop
Westshore, downtown and the office parks scattered along I-275 are full of companies running managed Windows machines with default settings nobody changed. If you sell to businesses, your buyer is often searching from exactly that machine during working hours. B2B queries skew toward desktop and toward the work day, which is the shape of Bing traffic.
The winter resident season
From roughly October through April, Tampa Bay fills up with seasonal residents, and that population skews older. Older users are more likely to be on a Windows laptop with default settings than on the latest phone with Chrome installed and configured. If you sell home services, healthcare, legal services, financial advice or anything else with an older customer base, your Microsoft Ads performance will often look different from your Google performance during those months. Track it seasonally rather than as one flat annual number.
Fewer bidders in the auction
This is the part that matters most and the part we will not put a number on, because your numbers will be yours. What we can say is the mechanism: in most local categories, fewer advertisers have bothered to set up Microsoft Ads at all. Fewer bidders in an auction generally means you clear at a lower price for the same ad position. Whether that turns into a lower cost per lead for you depends entirely on whether the traffic converts, which is the thing you have to test rather than assume.
A straight comparison
| Factor | Google Ads | Microsoft Ads |
|---|---|---|
| Search volume | Far higher in every category we have ever measured | A fraction of it. Plan for a smaller account, not a parallel one. |
| Auction competition | Crowded in nearly every Tampa service category | Usually thinner, especially in local services and B2B |
| Audience skew | Broad, mobile-heavy, all ages | Skews desktop, work hours, and older users |
| Unique targeting | Broadest set of audience signals, strongest automation | LinkedIn company, industry and job function targeting |
| Setup effort | Built from scratch | Import from Google in minutes, then fix what breaks |
| Automation maturity | Smart Bidding has years of data behind it | Automated bidding works, but needs more conversions to settle |
| Reporting | Deeper, with more third-party tooling | Adequate. Familiar if you know Google Ads. |
The import trap
Microsoft will import your entire Google Ads account, and this is genuinely useful. It is also where most Microsoft Ads accounts quietly die.
The import copies structure, keywords, ads and budgets. What it cannot copy is the fact that your Google account was tuned over months against a completely different volume of traffic. A campaign with a $60 daily budget in Google may only find a handful of relevant searches a day in Bing. Split into six tightly themed ad groups, each one starves. Nothing gets enough data to optimize, automated bidding never gets its footing, and after six weeks somebody looks at the account and concludes Bing does not work.
What to do instead, in order:
- Import, then consolidate. Collapse your campaigns down. If Google has eight campaigns, Microsoft probably wants two or three. Fewer, larger ad groups gather data faster.
- Cut the long tail immediately. Keywords that get a trickle of traffic in Google will get nothing in Bing. Keep the terms with real intent and real volume, pause the rest.
- Check every tracking template and final URL. Imports carry over tracking parameters built for Google. If your URLs have a Google click ID appended by a tracking template, that template needs rewriting or your reporting will be wrong from day one.
- Re-import your conversion actions properly. Microsoft has its own tag, the Universal Event Tracking tag. It has to be installed and the conversion goals defined in Microsoft’s interface. Nothing works without this, and "nothing works" here means you will make bidding decisions on no data.
- Start with manual or maximize clicks bidding. Move to a target CPA only once you have accumulated enough conversions for the system to have something to learn from. On a low-volume account that can take a while.
- Review your negative keyword lists. They import, but Bing’s query mix is different. Look at the search terms report weekly for the first month and add negatives aggressively.
LinkedIn targeting, the one thing Google cannot do
Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft Ads lets you target or bid-adjust by LinkedIn company, industry and job function. For a Tampa B2B company this is the single strongest argument for the platform, and it has nothing to do with cost per click.
A hypothetical: say you sell compliance software to community banks and credit unions. In Google you bid on your keywords and hope the right people click. In Microsoft you can bid on the same keywords and apply a large positive bid adjustment when the searcher’s LinkedIn profile puts them in financial services, or in a compliance job function. Same keyword, same ad, better odds that the click is a buyer rather than a student writing a paper.
It is not perfect. Not every searcher is matched to a LinkedIn profile, so treat it as a bid adjustment layer rather than a hard filter unless your volume can survive the reduction. But there is no equivalent in Google Ads, and for narrow B2B audiences it can change the economics of a campaign. We go deeper on structuring this kind of account in our guide to Google Ads for B2B companies in Tampa, and most of it carries across directly.
How much budget to put behind it
The mistake here runs in both directions. Some businesses move half their spend across on the strength of a blog post about cheap clicks, then cannot find enough traffic to spend it. Others allocate so little that the account never gathers enough data to prove anything either way.
A sensible approach: take a slice of your existing paid search budget rather than adding new money, size it so that your best-performing campaign can run without hitting its daily cap, and commit to leaving it alone for a full month. If your Google account is already at a budget you are happy with, the guidance in our piece on how much Tampa businesses should spend on Google Ads gives you the framework for splitting it sensibly.
Judge it on cost per qualified lead, never on click volume. Microsoft Ads will always lose a click volume contest. That is not the question you are asking.
On the management side, our PPC pricing packages start at $199 a month for a Starter account, which is generally the right tier for a Microsoft account running alongside an established Google one rather than as your main channel.
What not to do
- Do not run it as a set-and-forget copy of Google. An unmanaged imported account drifts. Search terms differ, and without weekly negative keyword work you will pay for queries that would never have reached you in Google.
- Do not judge it in two weeks. Lower volume means it takes longer to accumulate enough conversions to say anything honest. Give it a full month minimum, longer if you are a considered-purchase business.
- Do not skip conversion tracking because "we will add it later." Later never comes, and every decision you make in the meantime is a guess.
- Do not assume the cheaper click is the better click. A cheap click that never turns into an inquiry is more expensive than an expensive click that does.
- Do not turn on the Microsoft Audience Network by default and forget it. Native placements behave nothing like search intent. Run them as their own campaign with their own budget so they cannot quietly absorb your search spend.
- Do not treat it as a substitute for social. It answers a different question. If you are weighing intent-based search against interruption-based social, our comparison of Facebook Ads and Google Ads for Tampa small business lays out where each one earns its place.
Who should test it, and who should not
Worth a test: B2B and professional services firms, medical and dental practices, legal and financial practices, home services with an older customer base, manufacturers and industrial suppliers around Plant City and Lakeland, and any business already spending enough in Google that a second channel is worth the management overhead.
Probably not yet: businesses under a very small monthly paid budget, brands aimed squarely at a young mobile audience, and anyone whose Google account is not yet properly tracked and tuned. Fix the main channel first. If you are running e-commerce, keyword selection is the bigger lever either way, and our notes on the best PPC keywords for Tampa e-commerce retailers apply to both platforms.
Where to start
Four free steps, this week:
- Check your own analytics for Bing traffic. Look at organic and referral sources over the last twelve months. If Bing is already sending you visitors who convert, you have your answer before you spend anything.
- Create a Microsoft Advertising account and run the Google import as a draft. You do not have to launch it. Just look at what comes across and how much of it would need collapsing.
- Install the Universal Event Tracking tag now. It can gather audience data before you launch a single ad, which puts you in a better position on day one.
- Search three of your own money keywords in Bing. Count the ads above the results. If there are one or two where Google shows four, you have found your opportunity.
If you would rather have someone else do the import and the first month of pruning, that is what our Microsoft Ads management service exists for, and it sits alongside the same team handling Google Ads management so the two accounts are not fighting each other. We are a Google Partner, we have managed more than $40M in ad spend, and the number here in Tampa is (813) 592-8605 if you want a straight opinion on whether it is worth your time.
Most accounts still start on Google. If you want the detail on that side, read how we handle Google Ads management in Florida.
