Display Ads Bing for Marketers: A Practical Guide

Bing display advertising runs through Microsoft Advertising, and the product you are actually buying is the Microsoft Audience Network, which places image, native and video ads across MSN, Outlook.com, Microsoft Edge and a stack of partner publishers. You pick an Audience campaign, upload your creative assets, and the network handles the rest using audience signals pulled from Bing search behaviour, Edge browsing data and LinkedIn profiles.

If you want to get moving today, here is the shortest possible path.

1. Set up an Audience campaign inside Microsoft Advertising, not a Search campaign with display added on
2. Upload several images, headlines and descriptions so the responsive multimedia format has something to work with
3. Install UET, Universal Event Tracking, before you spend a penny, so every click has a conversion path to follow
4. Choose your targeting layer: in market audiences, remarketing lists, LinkedIn profile data, or a combination
5. Launch with a modest daily budget, watch the first week closely, then scale what works

That is the mechanical version. The rest of this guide covers why each of those steps matters and how to avoid the mistakes that quietly waste half your budget.

Key takeaways

Effective Bing display advertising depends on using Audience campaigns with rich creative assets, proper UET tracking, layered audience signals, and consistent weekly optimisation.

Point	Details
Use Audience campaigns, not basic display	Build dedicated Audience campaigns to reach native, video and multimedia formats together.
Prepare varied creative assets	Supply several images, headlines and descriptions so responsive ads can test combinations.
Install UET before launch	Set up Universal Event Tracking first so conversion data is not lost during the early weeks.
Layer targeting signals deliberately	Combine in market, remarketing and LinkedIn data rather than relying on one alone.
Consider outsourcing if resources are tight	AMW Media’s PPC management service covers setup, creative and ongoing optimisation for teams without spare capacity.

What is Bing display advertising and why does it matter?

Microsoft does not call it Bing display advertising internally. The product is the Microsoft Audience Network, and Audience campaigns are the vehicle you use to buy into it. The keyword phrase persists because most marketers still think in terms of the Google Ads competitor, but Microsoft Advertising is an advertising platform in its own right and, while it was formerly Bing Ads before the rebrand, the mechanics are different once you are inside it.

The Audience Network reaches large numbers of monthly users across premium properties such as MSN, Outlook and Microsoft Edge, with placements extending across Microsoft properties and partner search engines such as Yahoo and AOL, which gives you inventory most advertisers never think to bid on. That matters because auction prices tend to be lower than the equivalent slots on more crowded networks, simply because fewer advertisers are fighting over them.

What sets it apart is not the inventory though. It is the targeting data behind it.

• Edge browsing signals show what people are actually researching, not just what they searched once
• Bing search intent carries over into display targeting, so someone who searched best CRM for small business can be retargeted with your CRM ad on MSN the next day
• LinkedIn professional data lets you target by job title, industry and company size, which almost no other display network can do at scale

Audience campaigns differ from generic display buys because they combine this intelligence with format flexibility. One campaign can serve display banners, native ads and video without you building three separate campaigns. Display placements help build brand awareness, while search ads capture people with more immediate intent.

Pro tip: do not treat the Microsoft Audience Network as a brand awareness afterthought bolted onto your search budget. Run it as its own performance channel with its own conversion goals, its own creative testing calendar and its own optimisation schedule. Agencies that treat it as an awareness freebie almost always underperform the ones that give it a real strategy.

Where do Bing display ads actually appear?

Your ads run across a defined set of Microsoft owned properties, within Bing search results and other search environments where relevant, plus a curated network of partner publishers. That gives you more control over placement quality than open exchange display buying typically offers.

The main placements are:

• MSN, homepage and content pages, high traffic and broadly consumed
• Outlook.com, inbox adjacent placements that catch people in a task focused, checking email mindset
• Microsoft Edge, new tab page placements, which land in front of people the moment they open a browser
• Microsoft Casual Games, a surprisingly effective placement for consumer brands, given how long people linger in these apps
• Publisher partners, a curated network extending reach beyond Microsoft’s own properties

Microsoft’s own planning tools break down vertical level data for these placements, which is worth checking before you commit budget if your category has strong seasonal patterns.

Native placements, the river style ads that sit inline with editorial content, tend to blend in better and often pull stronger engagement than a standard rectangular banner, because they do not shout advertisement the moment someone scrolls past. Classic banner placements still have their place, particularly for retargeting where recognition matters more than subtlety.

Placement choice also dictates your creative requirements. A native ad on MSN needs a strong headline and a clean image that works small. An Edge new tab placement needs something bold enough to survive a two second glance before someone opens a new page.

Microsoft describes the Audience Network as built on numerous daily first party signals, which it uses to build audience intelligence across these placements rather than relying purely on third party cookie data. That distinction is becoming more valuable as cookie based targeting keeps degrading elsewhere.

Ad formats and creative specifications you need to know

Microsoft Audience campaigns can serve one or several ad types, including display, native and video, within a single campaign, sharing the same budget and targeting settings. That is a genuine time saver compared with platforms that force you to build a separate campaign per format.

The formats available to you:

• Responsive multimedia ads, you supply assets and Microsoft assembles combinations automatically
• Standard image banners, fixed size creative for specific placements
• Native river and inline ads, which blend into content feeds
• Gallery and interstitial formats, used for richer, more immersive placements
• In stream video, which plays within video content on partner sites

Sizes and placement requirements change often enough that the Microsoft media kit is the only version worth trusting. Check it before you brief a designer rather than working from a spec sheet someone saved last year.

For responsive multimedia ads specifically, you will need several images, ideally landscape and square variants, a few headline options, a couple of description lines, and a final URL that matches what the ad promises. Image quality matters more than people assume. A slightly soft or poorly cropped photo will sink your click through rate even when the offer is strong.

Pro tip: supply landscape images as your priority, then add square and portrait crops if you have them. The automated system fills more placements and builds better combinations when it has several aspect ratios to choose from, rather than one image stretched to fit everything.

How does audience targeting work on Microsoft Advertising?

The single biggest differentiator against other display networks is the layering of Edge browsing data, Bing search intent and LinkedIn professional profiles, which lets you target by job function or seniority in a way most display platforms simply cannot replicate.

LinkedIn profile targeting lets you filter by company, industry, job function and seniority level. That is rare for a display network and one of the strongest reasons B2B advertisers should test this channel even if they have written off display advertising elsewhere.

Beyond LinkedIn data, your main targeting levers are:

• In market audiences, people actively researching a product category
• Affinity and interest audiences, broader lifestyle and interest based segments
• Custom audiences, built from your own URL lists, keywords or app usage, with customer match as another first party data option
• Remarketing lists, people who have already visited your site or engaged with previous ads
• Lookalike audiences, modelled on your best existing customers

The practical skill here is layering rather than picking one, and those choices should support your wider audience targeting strategy. A B2B software company might combine in market signals for project management software, LinkedIn job function targeting for operations manager, and a remarketing list of site visitors who did not convert. Stack too many narrow filters together, though, and you will strangle your own reach. Test each layer on its own before combining.

Pro tip: exclude irrelevant domains and low quality placement categories early. A lot of wasted spend on display networks comes from a handful of low value sites soaking up impressions nobody asked for. Check your placement report weekly for the first month and cut anything underperforming.

Setting up your first Microsoft Audience campaign

Here is the actual build process for a Microsoft Advertising display campaign, step by step.

1. Choose your campaign objective, then select the Audience campaign type specifically, not a Search campaign with display extensions.
2. Pick your budget structure, daily or lifetime, and decide whether you are running a shared budget across several campaigns or keeping this one isolated, so your advertising budget stays easier to control.
3. Name your campaign clearly, including objective and date range if you are running seasonal creative, so reporting still makes sense six months from now.
4. Build your ad groups, each targeting a distinct audience segment or placement type rather than lumping everything into one group.
5. Set your targeting and exclusions, layering in market, remarketing or LinkedIn signals as covered above, excluding categories that do not fit your brand, and adding negative keywords where applicable.
6. Upload your creative assets and assemble your responsive multimedia ads, making sure your final URL matches the landing page experience the ad promises.
7. Install and test UET before launch, confirming the tag fires correctly and conversions are actually being recorded.

Before you go live, run through this checklist:

• Preview how your ads render across placements, not just the ad preview thumbnail
• Check every creative asset against Microsoft Advertising’s content policies
• Set your ad schedule if your audience has clear time of day patterns
• Confirm device targeting matches where your landing page actually performs well

Skipping the UET step is the single most common reason campaigns look like they are not working a week in, when actually they are working fine and you just cannot see it. Our guide to PPC campaign setup steps covers the same discipline across Google Ads.

Bringing over campaigns you have already built in Google Ads

If you are already running display or shopping campaigns elsewhere, Microsoft Advertising’s import tool maps many settings automatically, which saves you rebuilding everything from scratch.

Campaign structure, audience lists and creative assets generally carry across cleanly. What does not always translate:

• Bidding strategies, because automated bidding logic does not map one to one between platforms, so review your bid settings after the import rather than assuming they transferred correctly
• Asset formats, because some image ratios and video specs differ, so check nothing has been stretched or cropped oddly
• Reporting metrics, because column definitions are not identical, which can make first week comparisons misleading if you expect matching numbers

The import itself is simple: authorise the connection between your Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts, select which accounts and campaigns to bring over, schedule the import, then verify everything landed as expected.

Pro tip: run a parallel test with one ad group before migrating your entire account. Import it, let it run for a week alongside your existing setup, and check the numbers make sense before you commit your whole display budget to the new platform, especially if a linked Google Ads account will support scheduled repeat imports later.

Budgeting and bidding: which model fits your goals?

Microsoft Advertising gives you the standard bid type menu: CPM, CPC, CPA and automated bidding options such as target CPA that optimise towards conversions directly.

The choice mostly comes down to what you are trying to achieve:

• CPM suits pure awareness plays, where impressions and reach matter more than clicks
• CPC works when you want people to visit your site and you are comfortable paying per click regardless of what happens after
• CPA and automated bidding suit performance focused campaigns, letting the algorithm chase conversions once you have enough conversion volume for it to learn from

Budget structure follows the same logic as most platforms: daily budgets for ongoing campaigns, lifetime budgets for time boxed promotions, and shared budgets if you are running several Audience campaigns that should collectively spend a fixed amount rather than each drawing independently. Bid testing works best in small, deliberate increments rather than dramatic swings.

Pro tip: if your audience shows clear time of day patterns, use bid adjustments to weight spend towards your highest converting hours rather than spreading budget evenly across twenty four. A B2B campaign that only converts during business hours is wasting money bidding at full strength overnight.

Every figure is published: Google Ads management starts at £599 a month, and the full rate card is on our pricing page, where you can tick what you need and see the total before you speak to anybody.

Measuring performance: what to track and why

Set up UET, Universal Event Tracking, before you launch anything, not after. It is the single tag that lets you tie ad exposure to actual on site behaviour, and retrofitting it after a campaign has been running for a month means losing that data permanently. The same rule applies to conversion tracking on Google Ads.

The metrics worth watching:

• Impressions and CTR, which tell you whether your creative is earning attention
• CPC, your actual cost efficiency per click
• View through conversions, people who saw your ad, did not click, but converted later anyway
• Conversion rate, what happens once someone lands on your site
• CPA, cost per acquisition, the number that actually matters to most business owners
• ROAS, return on ad spend, essential if you are running ecommerce and can tie revenue directly to spend

Here is how to react when each of these moves.

Metric	What it signals	What to do
CTR dropping	Creative fatigue or poor targeting fit	Refresh creative assets, test new headlines
CPC rising	Increased competition or an audience that is too narrow	Broaden targeting slightly or adjust bid strategy, and audit the account properly if it keeps climbing
Conversion rate falling	Landing page mismatch or audience quality issue	Audit the landing page experience, check audience overlap
CPA climbing	Inefficient spend allocation	Pause underperforming placements, reallocate budget
ROAS declining	Overall campaign efficiency dropping	Review the full funnel from ad to checkout

Check reports weekly at minimum during the first month, then settle into a monthly cadence once performance stabilises. Break your reporting down by creative, placement and audience segment separately, because a blended overall number hides which of the three is the problem when something underperforms. If your figures look wrong before you even start optimising, our five minute analytics checks are the place to start.

Optimising your campaigns month over month

Optimisation is not a one off task, it is a running schedule. Here is a practical framework.

1. Test creative variations. Swap images, headlines and calls to action one variable at a time so you know what actually moved the needle.
2. Refine audiences on performance data. Cut segments that underperform, double down on the ones that convert.
3. Adjust bids by audience and placement. Not every segment deserves the same bid, so split them out once you have enough data.
4. Apply frequency capping. Nobody converts better after seeing the same ad fifteen times in a week, so cap exposure before you burn out your best prospects.
5. Sequence messaging across channels. Show an awareness stage ad first, then retarget with a more direct offer, tying this back to your search and shopping campaigns.

A rough rhythm: weekly, check placement reports, pause obvious underperformers and monitor pacing against budget. Monthly, refresh creative sets, review audience segment performance and reassess bid strategy.

Pro tip: set up automated rules and alerts for the metrics you check most often, such as budget pacing, CPA thresholds and sudden CTR drops, so problems surface in your inbox instead of three weeks into a wasted spend cycle.

Why the Microsoft Audience Network outperforms expectations

The scepticism around Bing display advertising usually comes from people who tried it years ago and judged it purely on reach against Google’s display network. Reach was never really the selling point.

The actual advantage is signal quality. Microsoft combines search intent, browser behaviour and professional profile data in a way that is hard to replicate elsewhere, particularly the LinkedIn layer, which no comparable display network offers at this scale.

What this means in practice:

• Better targeting precision translates into less wasted impression volume on people who were never going to convert
• B2B advertisers get a targeting depth, by job title, seniority and company, that most display networks cannot touch
• First party signal reliance matters more each year as third party cookie targeting keeps eroding across the wider web

None of this makes the platform a guaranteed win. It means the targeting infrastructure gives you a real shot at efficiency that a generic open exchange display buy typically cannot match.

Three quick examples of the Audience Network in action

B2B lead generation using LinkedIn targeting

A software company running Audience campaigns layered LinkedIn job function targeting with in market audiences for their category. Objective: qualified demo bookings. Key setting: a LinkedIn seniority filter combined with a remarketing list of blog readers. Result: fewer total clicks than a broad campaign, but a noticeably higher proportion turned into actual sales conversations, because the audience was filtered by role rather than raw traffic volume.

Ecommerce extension using shopping style creative

A retail brand extended its shopping campaign audiences into Audience ads, using product imagery and pricing directly in the creative. Objective: incremental revenue from browsers who had not converted on search. Key setting: a custom audience built from cart abandoners plus a lookalike audience modelled on past purchasers. Result: view through conversions that would never have shown up in a last click search report, revealing that display was contributing to sales the search dashboard alone was hiding.

Brand awareness sequenced into conversion

A consumer brand ran a two stage campaign: broad CPM based awareness ads for a fortnight, followed by CPC based retargeting to anyone who had viewed the first wave. Objective: build recognition, then convert. Key setting: frequency capping on stage one, sequential messaging on stage two. Result: retargeted users converted at a noticeably better rate than cold traffic hit with the same offer directly, which confirmed the awareness stage was doing real work rather than just spending budget.

The lesson across all three: Audience campaigns rarely work well as a single, undifferentiated blast. The advertisers who get value out of this channel build a sequence, awareness then consideration then conversion, and design the audience layers and creative to match each stage.

What does Bing display advertising cost?

There is no fixed price list, because it is an auction like most paid media. What you pay depends on your bid type, competition for your chosen audience and placements, and how tightly you have defined your targeting.

A few practical patterns worth knowing:

• CPM rates tend to run lower than comparable Google display placements, largely because fewer advertisers are actively bidding here
• CPC costs for narrow B2B audiences, LinkedIn layered targeting especially, run higher than broad consumer targeting, which reflects the value of that data
• Automated bidding strategies need reasonable conversion volume before they optimise well, so if your daily budget is tiny you may never generate enough data for the algorithm to learn from

There is no minimum spend to get started, which makes this a low risk channel to test with a modest daily budget before committing serious money. Start small, watch your CPA over the first two to three weeks, and scale on what you actually see rather than what you assumed going in. It also stops you overcommitting before the data is clear. If you are weighing this against other channels, our guide to website advertising packages for SMEs sets out what a realistic monthly spread looks like.

Staying compliant with Microsoft Advertising policies

Microsoft reviews every ad before it goes live, and rejected creative is one of the most common reasons campaigns stall before they ever start delivering impressions.

The policies that trip people up most often:

• Prohibited content categories. Certain product types, including some financial services, healthcare claims and adult content, face outright restrictions or need certification first
• Claims substantiation. Any specific claim, such as clinically proven or guaranteed results, needs backing or it gets flagged during review
• Trademark and intellectual property use. Using someone else’s brand name or imagery without rights is an automatic rejection
• Destination URL requirements. Your landing page has to match what the ad promises, and mismatched or broken final URLs get pulled

Review your creative against Microsoft’s advertising policies before submission rather than after rejection. It saves days of back and forth, which matters most on time sensitive seasonal campaigns where a rejection cycle eats into your window.

Fixing common setup and delivery problems

Most delivery issues trace back to a handful of predictable causes.

Low or zero impressions usually means your targeting is too narrow, your bid is too low for the competition in that audience, or your budget is being capped before the campaign has a chance to spend meaningfully. Check your bid competitiveness first, because it is the quickest fix.

Ads approved but not serving often points to placement exclusions being too aggressive, or a scheduling setting that is inadvertently limiting delivery to a narrow window. Double check your ad schedule, because it is an easy thing to set once and forget.

Conversions not tracking is almost always a UET tag issue: it is not firing on the right page, it is firing but not tied to the correct conversion goal, or there is a reporting delay that makes it look broken when it is only lagging. Use Microsoft’s UET tag helper to confirm the tag fires before assuming your tracking is broken.

Underperforming responsive multimedia ads frequently comes down to a thin asset library. If you have supplied one image and one headline, the system has nothing to test. Add variety and give it room to work.

Designing A/B tests that actually tell you something

Testing on a display network is easy to do badly. Change three things at once and you have a result with no explanation attached to it.

Structure your tests properly:

• Isolate one variable per test, image, headline or call to action, never all three at once
• Run tests long enough to reach statistical relevance, because a two day test on a small budget tells you almost nothing
• Test placement specific creative separately from audience tests, because combining both makes it impossible to know which change drove the result
• Compare native against standard banner formats for the same audience, since format performance varies by category

A sensible cadence is one clear variable change every one to two weeks per ad group, giving each test enough runway to gather meaningful data before you draw conclusions.

When Microsoft display ads make sense, and when they do not

The Microsoft Audience Network earns its place in a media plan when you need precision targeting other display networks cannot offer, particularly the LinkedIn professional data layer for B2B, or when you want to extend an existing shopping campaign into a lower cost complementary channel. In most channel mixes, display is strongest for awareness and remarketing while search is better at capturing higher intent demand.

The integration opportunity is where most advertisers leave value on the table. Use sequential messaging that ties your Audience campaigns to your search and shopping activity: someone who searched a product term on Bing but did not convert is a natural remarketing candidate for an Audience ad a few days later. Feed conversion data back into your search campaigns too, because audience insights gathered through display often sharpen your search bidding in ways search data alone would never show. Shared audience lists across campaign types keep this consistent rather than treating each channel as an island, which is the same principle behind any coherent digital marketing strategy.

There are situations where another channel serves you better. If you need very broad, cheap reach with no targeting sophistication required, a simple programmatic display buy might get there faster. If your play is fundamentally social and depends on native platform engagement, shares, comments and algorithmic reach, a social first channel will outperform a display network built around passive impression delivery. The Microsoft Audience Network is not the answer to every media plan question, but for precision targeted, intent informed display, it is rarely the wrong first test.

If you would rather have someone else run it

Running a Microsoft Audience campaign properly, with decent creative variety, correct UET setup and weekly optimisation, is not complicated in theory. It does eat hours you might not have spare, especially if you are also running search, social and everything else that keeps a business visible. That is the honest trade off with any paid channel: the mechanics are learnable, the ongoing attention is the real cost.

AMW Media builds and manages PPC campaigns across Microsoft Advertising and Google Ads. For Audience campaigns specifically that means handling the creative production, photography, video and image sets built for responsive multimedia formats, the UET setup and conversion tracking, and the weekly optimisation cycle most in house teams do not have the bandwidth for. We pair that with the broader picture too, including landing page builds that match what your ads promise, because a sharp campaign pointed at a poor landing page is money wasted regardless of how good the targeting is.

If you want a second opinion on a campaign that is underperforming, or you are starting from scratch and would rather skip the trial and error phase, book a free campaign audit and we will tell you what is worth fixing and what is worth building fresh.

Where to go for deeper reading

Microsoft’s own documentation covers the technical setup thoroughly, and it is worth bookmarking a few pages rather than relying on secondhand summaries.

• For creative specs and standard sizing, check the Microsoft media kit
• For the campaign build process, Microsoft Learn’s Audience campaign guide walks through the setup flow
• For audience planning and targeting options, Microsoft’s audience targeting page explains how the signal layers work together
• For keyword discovery, Microsoft’s keyword planner works alongside those audience and campaign resources
• For combining data sources across platforms, Valiz covers the ad tech side of signal enrichment

Where Bing display ads fit next to Google

Bing display ads are usually an afterthought, which is exactly why they can be worth running. Less competition means lower costs, and the audience skews older and more corporate than Google’s.

That makes the Microsoft Audience Network worth testing for business to business, finance, and any product bought by people using a work computer. It is rarely a primary channel and it is often a cheap secondary one, which is a reasonable thing for a budget to be. If you are in north west London and would rather hand this to one team, our Harrow marketing page shows how that works.

Frequently asked questions

How much does it cost to advertise on Bing?

There is no fixed minimum. It runs on an auction, so cost depends on your bid type, targeting and competition. Most advertisers start with a modest daily budget and scale once they see stable cost per acquisition figures. If you are also running search ads, those can appear above the organic results, while display pricing follows different placements.

How much do display ads pay?

Display advertising is not a payment model for advertisers, it is what you spend to reach an audience. If the question is about publishers earning from hosting ads, that revenue depends on the specific ad network and traffic volume, which sits outside how an advertiser should evaluate the channel.

Are display ads still effective?

Yes, particularly when paired with strong audience signals rather than broad, untargeted placement. The Microsoft Audience Network combination of search intent, browsing behaviour and LinkedIn data gives display a targeting precision that generic banner buys lacked a decade ago.

Can I advertise on Bing?

Yes. Any business can create a Microsoft Advertising account and run display alongside search led campaigns, provided the creative and offer comply with Microsoft’s advertising policies. Depending on your goals you can also use app install ads and Microsoft Audience ads alongside Audience campaigns, while Dynamic Search Ads can generate relevant ad titles from your own web pages. If setup feels like more than your team has time for, AMW Media’s PPC management can build and run it for you.

Sources

• How do I create an Audience campaign? Microsoft Advertising, Microsoft Learn
• Microsoft media kit, Microsoft Advertising
• Audience targeting, Microsoft Advertising