Microsoft Advertising for dentists: is Bing worth it?

Microsoft Advertising for dentists is the same idea as Google Ads on a smaller stage: you bid on searches like "dentist near me" or "dental implants" and pay when someone clicks. The audience is smaller than Google's, so it will never be your main source of patients. The question is whether the extra searches are worth the extra hour a month, and for practices already running Google Ads well, the answer is often yes, provided you set it up so it does not quietly overspend.

What is Microsoft Advertising?

Microsoft Advertising, still widely called Bing Ads, is Microsoft's pay-per-click platform. Microsoft says search ads can appear on Bing, AOL, Yahoo and syndicated partner sites, and its own product pages add DuckDuckGo and Ecosia to the list of partners. So one account reaches people searching on several engines that are not Google.

For a dental practice the practical point is simple. Some of your future patients do not use Google. They search from a work laptop where Bing is the default, from the Windows search box, or from a browser someone else set up. If you only advertise on Google, those searches go to whoever is on Bing.

How does a Microsoft ad work?

It works like Google Ads. You choose keywords, write ads, set a location and a budget, and enter an auction each time someone searches. Microsoft says your keywords decide which searches your ad is eligible for, and you can target by location, including a radius around your practice. If you have run Google Ads, the screens will feel familiar within an hour.

How much does Microsoft Advertising cost?

You set the budget and pay per click. There is no fixed fee for the account itself, and the cost of each click is set by the auction for that search in your area, so nobody can honestly quote you a dental cost per click for your town without looking at your market.

Two things about the budget catch people out:

• The daily budget is a target, not a cap. Microsoft says your actual daily spend might be higher or lower because it works out the limit across the whole month. Plan on the monthly figure.
• Budgets are set per campaign, not per ad group. If you want implants and general dentistry to have separate spending limits, they need separate campaigns.

Is Microsoft Advertising free?

Opening an account costs nothing. The clicks are what you pay for. The same is true of Bing's free map listing, which is a separate product and is covered further down.

Is Microsoft Advertising worth it for a dental practice?

Worth it is a calculation, not an opinion. The same one that decides whether Google Ads pays: what is a new patient worth to you, what proportion of enquiries book, and what can you therefore afford per click. Our guide to Google Ads for dentists walks through that sum. Run it with your own numbers before spending anything on either platform.

With that in hand, Microsoft Advertising tends to make sense when:

• Your Google campaign is already profitable and limited by the number of searches, not by your budget. Bing is the obvious next pool of the same kind of searcher.
• You sell high value treatment such as implants, clear aligners or cosmetic work, where a single case covers a lot of clicks.
• You can measure bookings, not just clicks. Without that you will not know whether it worked.

It tends not to make sense when your Google campaign is not working yet. Copying a losing campaign onto a second platform doubles the problem. Fix the landing page, the negatives and the phone handling first.

Bing Ads vs Google Ads: the differences that matter

The LinkedIn feature is worth one sentence of caution. Microsoft's LinkedIn targeting page describes picking companies, industries or job functions and setting a bid adjustment for each. Patients do not choose a dentist by employer or job title, so for most practices it is a curiosity rather than a priority.

How to set up Microsoft Ads for your practice

1. Sign up at ads.microsoft.com with an email address the practice controls, not a personal one or an agency's. The Microsoft Advertising login is then the same account you use to manage billing and users.
2. Install the UET tag, Microsoft's tracking code, on your website and create conversion goals for the actions that matter: a booking form sent, a click on your phone number. Microsoft's Universal Event Tracking guide covers the setup.
3. Import your Google campaigns rather than building from scratch, then review everything the import changed or skipped.
4. Check location targeting. Set a tight radius or list the towns you actually serve. Patients rarely travel far for routine care.
5. Check ad distribution. Microsoft says that, depending on your campaign settings, search ads may also appear across Microsoft Advertising Network placements, not just on search results. Decide deliberately whether you want that, because a display placement behaves very differently from a search.
6. Add your negative keywords before you go live. Jobs, training, salary, DIY and "free" searches waste money on Bing exactly as they do on Google.
7. Set ad schedules to the hours someone can answer the phone, or make sure the website can take a booking out of hours.

The import setting that overwrites your changes

This is the trap. The Google import can run on a schedule, and Microsoft says scheduled imports keep reactivating the campaigns and modifying the settings back to what they are on Google Ads, including the budget. So if you pause a campaign on Bing, or lower its budget, the next import can undo it.

Pick one of two approaches and stick to it:

• Mirror Google. Keep the scheduled import, make every change in Google Ads, and accept that Bing follows. Review the import schedule and history after each run.
• Manage Bing separately. Import once, then turn the schedule off and manage the account on its own terms.

The mistake is doing both: editing Bing by hand while a scheduled import quietly puts the old settings back.

Microsoft Advertising Editor and managing it in less time

Microsoft Advertising Editor is Microsoft's free desktop app, for Windows and Mac, for making bulk changes offline and posting them in one go. For a single practice with a handful of campaigns, the web interface is usually enough. The Editor earns its place when you are adding a long negative keyword list or rewriting many ads at once.

A realistic routine for a practice:

• Weekly for the first month: read the search terms report and add negatives. This is where most of the early waste shows up.
• Monthly after that: compare cost per booked patient on Bing with Google. If Bing is cheaper per booking, it deserves more budget. If it is dearer, cut it back or pause.
• Quarterly: check that the conversion tracking still fires. Website changes break tags more often than anything else.

Measuring Bing properly

The clicks are easy to count. Patients are not. Most dental enquiries end in a phone call or a booking made in your practice management software, and neither shows up in the ads account by default.

Microsoft supports two ways to close that gap. With auto-tagging on, each ad click carries a click ID called msclkid to your website, and you can later upload the bookings that came from those clicks as offline conversions. That lets Microsoft see which searches led to real patients, not just form fills. It takes some setup, but it is the difference between optimising for clicks and optimising for bookings.

At the very least, ask every new patient how they found you and make sure reception records "Bing" or "Microsoft" as a separate answer from "Google". Patients often say "Google" for any search engine, so treat that answer with some caution.

Bing Places: the map listing alongside the ads

The paid ads and the map listing are separate products. Bing has its own free business listing, Bing Places for Business, which decides how your practice appears on Bing Maps and in Bing's local results.

Bing lets you import your details from your Google Business Profile and keep them up to date. If your practice has never claimed its Bing listing, do that before spending a penny on Bing ads. It is free, and an ad that sends someone to a listing with old opening hours or the wrong phone number wastes the click. The same applies to every directory that carries your details, which is why consistent listings are part of any sensible local SEO routine.

Common mistakes with Microsoft Ads for dentists

1. Importing a broken Google campaign. Bing will faithfully copy every mistake.
2. Leaving scheduled imports on while editing Bing by hand. Your changes get reverted.
3. Treating the daily budget as a hard limit. Microsoft balances spend across the month.
4. Leaving audience placements on without meaning to. Check distribution settings so search money stays on search.
5. No conversion tracking. Without it, the platform's automated bidding has nothing useful to aim at.
6. Bidding on your own practice name when you already rank first for it. Check what you already win organically before you pay for it.

The short version

• Microsoft Advertising reaches people searching on Bing, Yahoo, AOL and partners such as DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
• It is smaller than Google, so treat it as an extension of a campaign that already works, not a rescue for one that does not.
• Import from Google, then decide whether Google stays the master copy or Bing is managed separately.
• Claim your free Bing Places listing first.
• Judge it on cost per booked patient, the same as every other channel.