Almost every hearth dealer running search ads is running them on Google only. Microsoft Advertising will copy that account across in about ten minutes, which is the part everybody has heard. What nobody mentions is that the copy is not the work, and that one setting inside the import quietly overwrites the work every time it runs.
Why this comes up at all
Microsoft Advertising is the search network behind Bing, and it reaches people through Windows, Edge and Outlook as well as through the search box. For a fireplace and patio dealer the interesting thing about it is not the size of the network. It is the cost of finding out.
Testing a new social platform means new creative, a new audience build and a month of learning. Testing Microsoft means pointing it at the Google campaigns you already have and letting it copy them. If it produces nothing, you have lost a small budget and an afternoon. That asymmetry is the entire argument, and it is why we test it on almost every dealer account we take over.
What we will not do here is quote you a percentage. Whether Microsoft turns into a meaningful share of your leads depends on your market, your category and your customer's age, and any agency that gives you a number before running it is reading a case study rather than your account.
The import is real, and it is fast
Microsoft documents the whole thing. You connect your Google Ads credentials, pick the account and the campaigns you want, choose your import options, and schedule it. Search campaigns come across. So do Performance Max, Shopping, Display and Demand Gen campaigns, along with conversion goals and a Google Merchant Center feed.
Structure, keywords, ad groups, ad copy, targeting and campaign settings all come with it. For a dealer whose Google account has been built and negatived and refined over two years, that is two years of work landing in a second account for free.
Then the actual work starts.
What ten minutes does not buy you
Three things do not come across, and the first one is the reason most imported accounts sit at zero conversions for a month while somebody insists the platform does not work.
Your tracking does not transfer. Microsoft's conversion tracking runs on its own tag, Universal Event Tracking, and Microsoft is direct about it: UET is a prerequisite for conversion tracking and remarketing in paid search. You create one UET tag and add it to every page of your website. Your Google tag does nothing for Microsoft, and importing a conversion goal does not install anything on your site. If nobody adds the tag, the account runs blind, the automated bidding has nothing to learn from, and the report shows spend against no results.
Nobody reviews the ads. Imported copy is your Google copy, which may reference a promotion that ended, a Google-specific extension, or a landing page you have since replaced. Microsoft's own guidance is to review campaigns after import and finish them off. That review takes longer than the import and it is where the value is.
Remarketing starts from nothing. A Microsoft remarketing list has to reach 1,000 users before it will serve, and a similar audience needs 300 before it can be attached to an active campaign. At a single-showroom dealer's traffic volume that is not a first-month feature. Plan the test around search, not around audiences.
The setting that quietly undoes your work
This is the part worth the price of the article.
When you set up the import you choose a schedule, and the options are Auto, Now, Once, Daily, Weekly and Monthly. Auto lets Microsoft pick. Anything other than Now or Once means the import keeps running.
Microsoft says what a recurring import does, in a note most people never open. When scheduled imports are enabled, bids, bid strategies and campaign budgets may be updated to match the values in Google Ads, governed by three settings called Update bids, Update bid strategies and Update existing campaign budgets. A fourth setting, Updates to existing items, brings campaign status changes across, so a campaign you paused in Microsoft can be switched back on because the Google version is running.
Read that as an operator rather than as a manual. It means every optimization you make inside Microsoft is provisional. You raise a bid on the keyword that produces installs rather than parts, and the next sync sets it back to whatever Google says. You cut the budget on the campaign that is not working, and it comes back. You pause the grill campaign in February, and it un-pauses.
People conclude from this that Microsoft does not perform. What is actually happening is that nobody is allowed to manage it.
The fix is a decision made once, on day one. Either you treat Microsoft as a mirror of Google and never touch it, in which case leave the schedule on and accept that it will only ever be as good as the Google account. Or you treat it as its own account, in which case import once, then pause the schedule or turn off bids, bid strategies, budgets and status updates, and manage it like a real account. We do the second one, because the two networks do not have the same competition or the same cost per click, so the right bid on one is rarely the right bid on the other.
One warning if you go looking for the off switch. Deleting an import schedule unlinks the campaigns from the Google account entirely, and Microsoft notes that fully removing an account means deleting the schedule and the previously imported items. Pausing the schedule is the reversible move. Deleting it is not.
What to fix before you turn it on
A hearth-specific checklist, because the generic version misses the things that cost dealers money in this category.
- Give it its own budget. Not a slice of the Google budget moved sideways, and not so small that it never gets enough data to judge. A test you cannot read is not a test.
- Check the geography. Imported location targeting is Google's location targeting, and if that has drifted wider than your actual delivery and install radius you are now paying for it twice.
- Re-check your negatives. Every dealer needs the obvious ones for parts, repair, rental and DIY, and most need the category ones. A store that does not do HVAC needs the HVAC terms out, because "fireplace" and "heating" overlap in ways the machine does not understand.
- Make sure calls are counted. In this category most leads are calls, not forms, which is the point of our lead generation piece. A second search channel that produces calls nobody records will look like it produced nothing.
- Check the landing pages and the tracking template. Same pages, new source. If your reporting splits traffic by parameter, the parameter has to survive the import.
- Decide who watches it. A second account nobody logs into is a second way to spend money quietly.
How to judge it after thirty days
Cost per lead, and only cost per lead. Not clicks, not impressions, not the click-through rate, which will almost certainly look different from Google's for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the phone rang.
Compare it against the same period on Google, with the same definition of a lead on both sides. If the cost per lead is close, you have found a second stream at a comparable price and the sensible thing is to keep it. If it is much worse after the tracking is genuinely working, turn it off and stop wondering. Either outcome is worth an afternoon, and knowing is the return.
That comparison is only possible if a lead means the same thing in both accounts, which is the case for lead-level reporting generally. It is also the reason the tag matters more than the import.
Where this sits
Microsoft is not a strategy. It is one more place to buy the same intent, and it is unusually cheap to try because somebody already built the campaigns. For a dealer already running search ads, it is the least risky expansion available. For a dealer not running search ads yet, build the Google account properly first, because the import copies whatever is there, including the mistakes.
If you want us to look at whether it is worth it in your market, we will open the account, run the import, install the tag and tell you in thirty days. If the answer is no, you will get that plainly.
Sources
- Microsoft Learn, Universal Event Tracking, for UET being a prerequisite for conversion tracking and remarketing, the requirement to add the tag to every page of the site, and the 1,000 user remarketing list and 300 user similar audience thresholds.
- Microsoft Learn, Edit your scheduled imports and review import history and results, for the Auto, Now, Once, Daily, Weekly and Monthly schedule options, the note that scheduled imports may update bids, bid strategies and campaign budgets to match Google Ads, the Updates to existing items behavior, and the consequence of deleting an import schedule.
- Microsoft Advertising, Import tools, for what the Google import brings across and the instruction to review campaigns afterward.
Platform features change. Anything here that matters to a decision is worth checking against Microsoft's own documentation on the day you make it.