Microsoft Advertising runs the ads on Bing and on its search partners, including Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia. Its audience ads appear across MSN, Outlook and Microsoft 365, and ads now appear inside Copilot too. It was called Bing Ads until April 2019.
Search advertising is growing for Microsoft: its revenue rose 10% in the quarter to June 2026.
Campaigns and shopping
Advertisers run Search, Shopping, Performance Max and Audience campaigns. Performance Max became available globally in March 2024. Shopping campaigns draw on products in Microsoft Merchant Center, which can import a Google Merchant Center feed.
Getting started is quick for anyone already on Google: the import tool copies campaigns across from Google Ads, Meta Ads or Pinterest, once or on a recurring schedule.
Tracking and tools
A single UET tag handles conversion tracking and remarketing. Sales that close offline can be uploaded later and matched by click ID, up to 1,000 per request.
Microsoft Advertising scripts run JavaScript in a browser-based editor, and Microsoft Advertising Editor handles bulk changes on Windows and Mac. Copilot has been built into the platform for every advertiser since June 2024.
The Bing Ads API
The API, still known as the Bing Ads API and now at version 13, is split into six services: Campaign Management, Bulk, Reporting, Ad Insight, Customer Management and Customer Billing. Access needs a developer token and an OAuth 2.0 sign-in through Microsoft’s identity platform, and since December 2025 a Google sign-in works too.
The Bulk service uploads and downloads whole accounts as files of up to 100MB, including only what changed since last time. Reports are requested, prepared in the background and then downloaded. A sandbox lets integrations be built without serving real ads, and official SDKs cover .NET, Java, PHP and Python.
From SOAP to REST
The API began on SOAP and has offered a JSON-based REST version since 2024. Microsoft plans to retire SOAP fully on January 31, 2027, with new features shipping on both until then. An MCP server for AI assistants entered an open pilot in June 2026.
Second network, same question
Our order-level P&L reports each order’s profit with marketing costs and without, so spend on a second ad network can be judged on margin rather than clicks. Running Microsoft alongside Google makes that comparison more useful, not less.
The SOAP retirement in January 2027 is the kind of deadline that catches out integrations nobody is looking after. For the weekly cross-network report someone builds by hand, the time involved is worth putting a number on.