How much does Microsoft Advertising (Bing Ads) cost in the UK?

Most UK businesses that ask how much Bing Ads cost already run Google Ads and want to know whether the second search engine is worth the money. Microsoft renamed Bing Ads to Microsoft Advertising in 2019, but the platform works the same way: you bid on keywords, your ad shows on Bing and Microsoft's partner sites, and you pay when someone clicks. Here is how Microsoft Advertising cost works in the UK, what we can and cannot tell you about a typical click price, and the costs people miss.

The three costs, kept separate

• Ad spend: what you pay Microsoft for clicks. You set the budget, and it goes to the platform, not the agency.
• Management fee: what an agency charges to build, run and optimise the campaigns. A fixed monthly fee, separate from spend.
• Cost per result: what each enquiry, call or sale costs once the campaign is running. This is the number that decides whether Bing Ads paid off.

How Microsoft Advertising sets your cost per click

Microsoft Advertising is pay per click. Every time someone searches, Microsoft runs an auction between the advertisers bidding on that search, and you are charged only when someone clicks your ad. Microsoft does not charge for clicks it judges invalid, such as robot traffic.

• Your bid sets the ceiling. Microsoft describes your keyword bid as the maximum amount you can be charged when your ad is clicked. Most clicks cost less than the bid.
• Bid adjustments raise it. If you bid up for a location, device, time of day or LinkedIn profile, you pay that extra amount on top whenever the adjustment applies.
• Quality moves the price. Microsoft scores each keyword from 1 to 10 on how relevant your keyword, ad and landing page are to the search. Better relevance wins more auctions for the same money.
• Competition sets the rest. The more advertisers bidding on the same search in the same area, the more each click costs.

You can also let Microsoft bid for you with automated strategies such as maximise clicks, maximise conversions or a target cost per acquisition. Microsoft says it always respects your budget limit under any of them, and you can set a maximum cost per click as a cap.

Is there a minimum spend on Bing Ads?

Not one that matters. Microsoft publishes its minimums for every account currency, and for pounds sterling they are pennies.

Your daily budget is a target, not a hard cap on any single day. Microsoft converts it into a monthly limit (daily budget × 30.4) and paces spend across the month, so a busy day can spend more than the daily figure. Microsoft says it usually keeps overspend below 100% above your daily limit, and it refunds anything that goes over the monthly limit. You choose to pay later, on a billing threshold or your monthly billing date, or to prepay funds into the account.

A budget of a few pounds a day will run, but it will not tell you much. For a local business we recommend at least £500 a month in ad spend, so the campaign gets enough clicks to show which keywords produce enquiries. That is the same minimum we recommend for Google Ads.

What does a Bing Ads click cost in the UK?

This is where most guides quote a confident number, and where we will not. We found no published, dated benchmark of Microsoft Ads cost per click for UK advertisers that names its sample and method, so we do not quote one. The most cited study, WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 search advertising benchmarks, puts the average cost per click at $5.42, but that figure covers more than 13,000 US-based campaigns from April 2025 to March 2026, blends Google Ads and Microsoft Ads together, and is in US dollars. It is not a UK Bing price.

The useful number is the one for your own keywords in your own area, and there are two honest ways to get it:

1. Microsoft's keyword planner, inside a free Microsoft Advertising account, suggests bids and estimates clicks and cost for the keywords and locations you choose.
2. Import your Google Ads campaigns and run them for a few weeks. Your real Microsoft Ads CPC in the UK then sits in your own reports, next to your Google figures for the same keywords.

Then work the budget backwards. As an example only (these are not benchmarks): if the keyword planner suggests £2 a click, £600 a month buys about 300 clicks. If 1 in 20 of those clicks turns into an enquiry, that is 15 enquiries at £40 each. Swap in your own click price and enquiry rate to see what a month of Bing Ads should produce.

Is Bing Ads cheaper than Google Ads?

Often per click, because the auction mechanics are the same and fewer UK advertisers bid on Bing, so many keywords face less competition. But we have no UK benchmark we can stand behind for how much cheaper, and the gap varies by keyword and area, so check it in your own account rather than trusting a headline percentage.

The bigger difference is volume. Statcounter puts Bing at 6.08% of UK search across all devices in September 2026, against 91.39% for Google. On desktop, Bing's share rises to 18.33%. Microsoft's network also serves ads on Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia, which adds some reach on top. So Bing Ads works as an addition to Google, not a replacement: cheaper clicks on a smaller pool of searches. Judge it by cost per enquiry and cost per booked job, not cost per click.

What changes your Microsoft Advertising cost

• Keyword choice: broad, high-competition terms cost more per click than specific service and location searches.
• Location targeting: you can target a radius, a town or a postcode district. For UK postcodes Microsoft recognises only the first part (the 2 to 4 characters before the space), so tight local targeting usually means a radius.
• Bid adjustments: every uplift you add for device, time, location or audience adds to what a matching click costs.
• Ad and landing page quality: a higher quality score wins more auctions at the same bid.
• Where ads show: you choose whether ads run across the whole Microsoft network or only on Microsoft sites and select traffic.
• Season and competition: costs rise when more advertisers chase the same searches.

LinkedIn targeting, Audience ads and Shopping

LinkedIn profile targeting

Microsoft owns LinkedIn, and Microsoft Advertising lets you target or bid up on people by the company they work for, their industry and their job function, taken from their LinkedIn profiles. It works on Search, Dynamic Search, Shopping, Audience and Performance Max campaigns. On search you pay for it through bid adjustments, so it raises your cost per click on the people you care about rather than adding a separate fee. Microsoft added job seniority targeting in June 2026, but the UK was not among its launch markets. See how LinkedIn targeting on Microsoft Ads compares with what LinkedIn Ads cost in the UK.

Audience ads

Audience campaigns show image and native ads on MSN, Microsoft Start, Microsoft Edge, Outlook.com and partner sites, to people chosen by interest, purchase intent or a past visit to your site. You can pay per click or per thousand viewed impressions, and Audience campaigns can also run on a lifetime budget for the whole campaign. See Microsoft Audience Network ads.

Shopping ads

Microsoft Shopping campaigns show product ads with a price and image, priced per click like search. If you already run Google Shopping, Microsoft's Google Merchant Center import tool copies your product offers across, and scheduled imports keep them in sync, so you do not maintain a second feed. See Microsoft Shopping campaigns.

Importing from Google Ads keeps setup costs down

Microsoft's import tool copies your Google Ads campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads into Microsoft Advertising, and you can schedule it to repeat. It converts Performance Max campaigns into Performance Max or Search campaigns, and Demand Gen campaigns into Audience campaigns. Not everything comes across, so Microsoft tells you to review the campaigns after every import. The import saves a rebuild, but the bids, negative keywords and location settings still need tuning for Bing. See how we handle a Google Ads import into Microsoft.

VAT on Microsoft Ads spend for UK businesses

This catches out smaller businesses. Microsoft bills UK advertisers through Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd. Microsoft says that for UK business locations it does not charge VAT if you give it a valid VAT registration number, and applies a 0% reverse charge to the invoice instead. If you do not give a VAT number, Microsoft charges VAT at your local rate, which in the UK is the 20% standard rate.

• VAT-registered: add your VAT number in the account settings so the invoice carries the reverse charge, then account for it on your VAT return.
• Not VAT-registered: expect VAT on top of your ad spend. A £500 month of clicks becomes a £600 bill, so budget for the total.

Microsoft does not give tax advice and neither do we, so check how this applies to your business with your accountant.

The management fee on top

Running Microsoft Ads well is ongoing work: the Google import and Bing-specific retuning, negative keyword pruning, bid and location adjustments, conversion tracking and reporting on cost per enquiry. Scalepoint manages Microsoft Ads at £325/month as a standalone service, or inside the Surge bundle at £1,095/month alongside Google Ads and Meta Ads. The fee is fixed: no percentage of spend, no per-lead charge and no markup, and it stays the same whether you spend £500 a month or £5,000. Month-to-month, with 14 days' notice.

Sources & method

Platform facts come from Microsoft's own Microsoft Advertising help documentation on Microsoft Learn, read on 5 October 2026: "Microsoft Advertising Currencies" for the GBP minimum bids and budgets; "What are my budget options?" (updated 19 June 2026) for the 30.4 monthly conversion, overspend and refunds; "Did I bid high enough?" (19 June 2026) for bids as the maximum charge and incremental bids; "Quality score and quality impact in depth" (19 June 2026); "Let Microsoft Advertising manage your bids with bid strategies"; "What are my billing options?" (26 June 2026); "What is the Microsoft Advertising Network?" (19 June 2026); "How does ad language and location targeting affect who can see my ads?" (26 June 2026) for UK postcode targeting; "Microsoft Advertising profile targeting" (27 July 2026); the Google Ads and Google Merchant Center import articles (26 June 2026); and "Why we need your business location (and maybe VAT information)" (26 June 2026) for UK VAT and the reverse charge. The UK 20% standard VAT rate is from GOV.UK. Search share is Statcounter Global Stats, United Kingdom, September 2026, read 5 October 2026. The blended cost per click is from WordStream by LocaliQ's 2026 PPC benchmarks (13,000+ US-based Google Ads and Microsoft Ads campaigns, April 2025 to March 2026). The job seniority launch markets are from Search Engine Land, "Microsoft Ads expands LinkedIn targeting with job seniority filters" (16 June 2026). The worked example uses illustrative numbers to show the arithmetic, not data. Our own pricing comes from our pricing page. Microsoft changes its minimums and features, so check the current figures in your account.