Microsoft Advertising Bidding On Our Brand Name On Google

Usually when you see someone else’s ads on your own brand name on Google your not too happy about it.

However we’re delighted that little old us are worthy of the attention of the 4th largest company in the world by market cap.

And what a great time to write up our top 5 thoughts about Microsoft Advertising:

1) There used to a time when going on Microsoft Ads (or Bing Ads) was a no brainer. Typically a higher ROI than Google Ads could be driven albeit a fraction of the volumes. However over the last few years its harder to make Microsoft Ads work in our experience and on average we see CPC’s are increasing YoY. But we still have most of our PPC customers live with +60% getting a better ROI than Google Ads (but all under 10% of the volumes).

2) There is less competition on Microsoft Ads because most agencies / competitors are lazy or under resourced or blocked by bureaucracy. The UI is clunky and workflow annoying compared to Google. Finance / account set-up / tracking can be tedious. Yes, you can import from Google Ads and others but all comes with a few health warnings for another day. On top it should be mentioned that most innovations coming from Microsoft Ads are just copying what Google Ads does. Wrongly or rightly that’s their strategy to help limit barriers for Google Ads advertisers to also use Microsoft Ads too. Personally I think they should go more their own way and maybe after this AI search revolution the picture will be different.

3) Typically Microsoft Ads offers a higher value audience (thus often AOV’s or customer value) driven mainly by an older more affluent user base who are using Microsoft Edge or other browsers than come built into PC’s and other devices. Alongside we often see higher desktop users vs mobile across our customer’s. Its pretty good for B2B with Linkedin data to be leveraged and supposably employees stuck working on Microsoft machines / browsers doing corporate buying. Personally I only ever met one person whose company laptop was fixed to Internet Explorer by IT.

4) Your not just advertising on Microsoft Bing but also on all the smaller search engines: Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and MSN.

5) Finally brand bidding restrictions are less enforced which is bad for protecting your own brand traffic (and a reason you should be active on Microsoft Ads) but good for targeting competitors audiences / traffic / sales.