Microsoft Advertising : everything you need to know
Best for: retailers and brands already running Google Shopping, with a product feed ready to duplicate onto a second, less crowded search engine, reaching Bing's more mature, PC-heavy, higher-income audience at a historically lower cost per click.
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| Discovery | Purchase |
Microsoft Advertising, previously known as Bing Ads, is the search advertising platform behind Bing, Microsoft Edge, Copilot and Microsoft's syndication partners. Bing now counts over 1 billion monthly active users but still handles roughly a twentieth of Google's search volume worldwide, so it's a smaller, more concentrated audience rather than a like-for-like replacement for Google. Product ads work on the same underlying logic as Google Shopping: a Merchant Center feed, campaign settings and bidding, which is exactly why Google Shopping campaigns can be imported straight into a Microsoft Advertising account.
Because the structure mirrors Google Shopping so closely, the feed decisions that matter here are largely the same ones: accurate categories, complete attributes, and a price that holds up against every other listing in the same shopping grid. Microsoft retired Smart Shopping campaigns in 2024 and finished migrating every remaining account to Performance Max by January 2025, so Performance Max is now the default automated Shopping campaign type on Bing, not an optional upgrade.
Lengow synchronises your catalogue automatically with Microsoft Advertising, handling category matching, attribute mapping and Custom Labels for segmentation. As with most advertising channels, there's no direct API connection pulling performance data back into Lengow (Google is the exception), so you track results in Microsoft Advertising's own reporting or through your account manager.
Key figures
Sources: Search Engine Journal on Microsoft's FY26 Q3 earnings call (May 2026, citing StatCounter, March 2026); Microsoft's FY26 Q3 earnings release
Channel positioning
Who will see your ads?
Bing's shoppers are a smaller, more concentrated pool than Google's: PC-heavy, skewed towards work hours, and by WordStream and Statista's account, a more mature, educated and higher-income audience than the average Google searcher.
Because fewer advertisers bid here, WordStream's analysts have repeatedly pointed to the opposite cost trend from Google, Microsoft Ads CPCs holding steady or falling even as Google's climb year over year. That gap, not Bing overtaking Google on volume, is the practical reason brands add it.
The trade-off is scale: at roughly a twentieth of Google's global search volume, Bing works best as an incremental, lower-cost extension of an existing Shopping strategy rather than a primary channel on its own. A catalogue too small to justify configuring and maintaining a second feed is a weak fit here.
Multi-category retailers already on Google Shopping
The easiest addition, since the feed structure and campaign logic carry over directly.
Home & home improvement
One of the higher-CPC categories on search generally, where Bing's typically cheaper clicks make the most visible difference to cost per lead.
Fashion & apparel
A consistently active Shopping category, well suited to Bing's product ad grid format.
B2B & higher-consideration purchases
Bing's work-hours, desktop-heavy audience fits longer sales cycles better than most impulse-buy categories.
Who runs Microsoft Advertising?
Because Microsoft Advertising is almost always a second account run alongside Google Ads, the people operating it tend to already own the Google Shopping strategy.
Paid search / SEA managers
Run Bing as a parallel account to Google Ads, often importing and adapting existing Shopping campaigns, and need the feed to stay in sync with Google's without manual duplication.
E-commerce feed managers
Maintain the Merchant Center feed, categories, GTIN, availability, custom labels, since Microsoft's product ad ranking depends on the same structured attributes as Google Shopping.
Growth / incremental-channel marketers
Test Bing specifically to diversify spend away from Google and lower blended CPC, and need clean reporting to prove the lift is incremental rather than cannibalised.
What you need to know before launching
Check the following against your own catalogue and account setup before configuring the channel.
Advertiser profile
Retailers and brands with a structured product feed, ideally already running Google Shopping, since the campaign structure carries over directly.
Cost model & budget
Auction-based CPC. The blended Google/Microsoft search benchmark sits at $5.42 average CPC, but Microsoft's own share has trended cheaper per WordStream's year-on-year reporting.
Countries
Microsoft Advertising itself runs in 200+ markets, but Merchant Center and Shopping campaigns are only live in a narrower set of core markets. Confirm current Shopping coverage for your target country before launching.
Technical setup
Claim your website, create a store in Microsoft Merchant Center, and add a product feed to it. Lengow synchronises catalogue changes automatically once the channel is configured.
Feed requirements
Mandatory: id, price, title, description, link, image_link, gtin/ean, brand. A separate Promotion Feed can be added for sale periods, surfaced as "special offer" links on your product ads.
Integration status
Smart Shopping campaigns no longer exist; every account runs on Performance Max. Lengow doesn't pull channel-level performance reports back automatically, Google API is the exception, so track results in Microsoft Advertising's own reporting.
How to advertise on Microsoft Advertising with Lengow
Setup follows Lengow's standard advertising channel process: claim your website and set up Microsoft Merchant Center, add the channel catalogue, complete category and attribute mapping, exclude any products you don't want listed, then launch and let Lengow keep the feed synchronised as your catalogue changes.
Most of what trips people up is feed quality, not the platform itself, since Microsoft Advertising's product ad ranking runs on the same logic as Google Shopping. Lengow's Advertising channel generic guide covers the shared configuration steps.
| Channel challenge | What successful advertisers do | What Lengow automates |
|---|---|---|
| Keeping listed price competitive in Bing's shopping grid, where price sits next to every rival listing | Track competitor pricing and reprice before margin erodes rather than after | NetRivals monitors competitor prices and feeds pricing decisions back into the catalogue |
| Keeping a second feed in sync with the one already running on Google Shopping | Manage both channels from one catalogue source rather than exporting twice | Lengow synchronises catalogue changes automatically across every connected channel, including Microsoft Advertising |
| Category matching and attribute mapping to Microsoft's own taxonomy | Map categories deliberately rather than relying on defaults, since mismatches suppress product ads | Lengow's category matching and attribute mapping structure this once and apply it across channels |
| Segmenting products for different bidding strategies | Use Custom Labels to group products by margin, season or performance rather than bidding flat across the catalogue | Lengow lets you build and apply Custom Labels directly from your catalogue data |
| Enriching listings beyond the mandatory attributes | Add optional but recommended attributes, including review data, to improve ad quality | Lengow can incorporate additional sources, such as reviews, into the enriched feed |
| Submitting sale-period promotions without rebuilding the whole feed | Submit Merchant Promotions in bulk ahead of sale periods rather than product by product | Lengow's Promotion Feed adds this as complementary information on top of the Catalogue Feed |
| Remarketing depends on a working UET tag, which is easy to leave misconfigured | Verify the Universal Event Tracking tag is firing correctly before relying on remarketing campaigns | Outside feed scope; this sits on your website's tracking setup, not the product feed |
| No native performance report pulled back into Lengow | Monitor performance directly in Microsoft Advertising's reporting tools | Lengow still reports on feed health, product counts and rejection reasons even where the channel doesn't return performance data |
Lengow's AI Studio can help keep titles, descriptions and images complete and consistent across both your Google and Microsoft feeds, which matters more once you're running product ads on two search engines with the same underlying ranking logic.
Lengow channel analysis: why Microsoft Advertising works as a second channel
Here's what Lengow's experience configuring it alongside Google Shopping points to.
Microsoft Advertising rarely wins on its own. It wins as the second feed that costs almost nothing extra to configure, because the first one already did the hard work.
Lengow channel analysis, 2026
Reuse, don't rebuild
A catalogue already structured for Google Shopping needs mapping, not rebuilding, to run on Microsoft Advertising.
Judge it on blended CPC, not volume
Bing won't match Google's traffic. Its case is a lower cost per click pulling down your overall search spend.
Performance Max is now the baseline
Anyone still planning around Smart Shopping is planning for a campaign type that no longer exists.
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