Last Updated on October 10, 2022 by Justin Clifton
Google Ads and Microsoft Ads are the two biggest platforms for search engine marketing in the US. They have a lot of similarities, but they also have some significant differences. If used properly, they can both do wonders for scaling businesses. Every business is different, so it’s important to take many factors into consideration as you develop a strategy for using these tools to promote business growth. As a search engine marketing expert, I’ve had a lot of hands on experience with both of these platforms. So in this article, I’d like to give you all my take on Google Ads vs. Microsoft Ads.
The first important thing to point out is that Google Ads was formerly called Google AdWords and Microsoft Ads was formerly called Bing Ads. Nomenclature and re-branding aside, these platforms can be used to serve ads across Google search, Bing search, and a wide variety of their search partners. So let’s quickly take a look at some facts regarding both Google search and Bing search.
Search Stats
- As of July 2020, Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average which amounts to over 3.5 billion searches per day. [1]
- Google search growth rate is around 10% per year. [1]
- Google search dominates the global search share with around 78%. [1]
- In terms of US search, Google search represents 62% of all US searches. [2]
Microsoft
- Bing provides search results for people searching with Bing, but it also provides search results for people searching on Yahoo! and other partner sites. Ads can also be served on the searches of those partner sites. [3]
- Bing is the third largest search engine globally, with a query volume of 4.58%. This percentage excludes Bing search partners. [4]
- When considering all of the platforms where Bing serves search results, Bing accounts for about 25% of US searches. [2]
So it’s pretty clear that while Google is the clear leader in terms of search globally and in the US, Microsoft’s search network shouldn’t be discounted or ignored. If your overall goal is to advertise to people searching for terms related to your business, it would be pretty crazy to just concede 25% of searches to competitors.
Balancing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads
So given the stats in the previous section, how should business owners go about balancing budgets between the two major search ad platforms? We know that Google should be the main priority because it has the largest share of the market by a landslide. But the mistake I see business owners make time and time again is interpreting the main priority as the only priority. I see so many companies put a lot of time and energy into building really sophisticated campaigns in Google Ads, and then they refuse to use Microsoft’s import feature to effectively copy and paste all that work over to another platform that will tap into another segment of the market and probably yield similar results. But since so many companies are overlooking Microsoft Ads altogether, that tends to make it cheaper than Google Ads. So those similar results could even come at a lower cost overall. I’ve even seen some of my clients paying about 50% less on a CPC basis with Microsoft Ads for very technical and high intent keywords.
And of course I know there are many people out there that are advertising on a tight budget. You could make the argument that you’re nowhere close to maxing out traffic potential with Google Ads, so why should you even bother with Microsoft Ads. My counter point would be that, as I just explained, Microsoft ads will typically yield similar quality traffic at a cheaper price, and regardless of how small your current budget is you can always dedicate a portion of it to a new platform. But let me be clear, I’m not saying that Microsoft Ads will always outperform Google Ads or even always be cheaper. There are a lot of variables from industry to industry. And as someone that has managed hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on both platforms in a matter of months for one single company, I can say without a doubt that Google’s ad tech is more sophisticated than Microsoft Ads. At least in the search engine marketing space, Google is the trailblazer and Microsoft has always been trailing behind them. But since Google’s tech is so good, even being a year behind Google isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Regardless, if I’m dealing with an account that is spending a lot of money and consequently feeding an algorithm a lot of conversion data, Google’s algorithms will almost always outperform Microsoft’s algorithms over long periods of time.
One other major consideration when thinking about how to allocate your search engine marketing budget between Google Ads and Microsoft Ads happens to be the demographics of both search engines. If you have a product or services that geared towards older and/or lower income segments of the population, you’ll probably want to allocate more of your budget to Microsoft Ads as opposed to Google Ads. If that’s true for your business, the first thing you’d want to do is make sure that you’re making use of the age and income targeting options on both platforms to bid aggressively or exclusively on those segments of the population. But beyond that, we must acknowledge that many people who use Bing simply use Bing because it’s the default search engine on their device. It’s no secret that PCs are more economical than Macs. It’s also no secret that many people, particularly elderly people, don’t know how to change their default browser. The default browser for PCs is Microsoft Edge and the default browser for Edge is Bing. Just some things to consider as you think about how your target demographic searches for products and services.
Summary
Anyone that wants to promote a business with search engine marketing should focus on building out campaigns in Google Ads first. Then, be sure to also give Microsoft Ads a fair shake by importing Google Ads campaigns over to Microsoft Ads. As a general recommendation, I’d suggest starting with a budget split of 80/20 between Google and Microsoft respectively. If you think a large portion of your target demo will be searching with Microsoft, be more generous with Microsoft for your initial budget split. I can’t think of a scenario where I would recommend spending more on Microsoft Ads than Google Ads from the very beginning. Adjust the budget split as results start to roll in. Adjust the budget split based on spend volume and conversion results. After a few months, you should be able to strike a nice balance between Google Ads and Microsoft Ads. I hope you’ve found this article informative. Good luck with your search engine marketing efforts, and feel free to contact me if you need to hire someone to take your search engine marketing accounts to the next level.
