Should Your Medical Practice Advertise on Bing?

An audiologist asked us a question on a call last month that more owners should ask. He was spending well on Google, the phone was ringing, and he wanted to know one thing: is there a cheaper room I am not walking into? There is. It is the one everyone forgets exists. It is Bing.

Say the word Bing to most practice owners and you get a smile, maybe a joke. That reaction is exactly why it can work. When a channel is easy to laugh off, nobody advertises there, and when nobody advertises there, the clicks get cheap and the competition thins out. For the right kind of practice, that is not a punchline. That is an opening. Let us walk through who is actually searching on Bing, what the numbers really say, and whether your practice is one that should test it.

Bing is bigger and richer than the joke suggests

First, scale. Bing, now folded into Microsoft Advertising, holds somewhere around 7 to 8 percent of US search across all devices, and closer to 10 percent on desktop, per Statista and multiple 2026 industry roundups. Single digits sounds small until you remember the size of the pie. That is still millions of American searches a day, and on a work computer or an older person's desktop, the share climbs, because Bing is the default engine on Windows and the Microsoft Edge browser.

Now the part that matters more than size. The people on Bing are not a random slice of the internet. Reported demographics show a majority of Bing users are 35 or older, the median age runs higher than Google's, and about 41 percent sit in six figure households. Translate that out of marketing speak: Bing skews toward established, older, higher income adults. If your practice treats knees, hearts, ears, eyes or anything that trends with age, that is your patient, sitting in the room nobody else is advertising in.

One more thing few owners realize. Microsoft Advertising does not just run on Bing. The same ads reach searches on Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, and the results inside Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant now built into Windows. So when we say Bing, we mean a whole network of searchers who never touch Google, and increasingly a slice of AI search too.

The clicks cost noticeably less

Here is where it gets interesting for a practice watching every dollar. Because so few advertisers bid on Bing, the auction is calmer, and calmer auctions mean cheaper clicks.

Industry reporting in 2026 pegs the average Bing cost per click at roughly 1.54 dollars, against about 2.96 dollars on Google. In the priciest categories, and healthcare is one of them alongside legal and finance, agencies that manage both platforms report Bing clicks running 30 to 50 percent cheaper. We have written before about why Google Ads have gotten so expensive for medical practices. Bing is the flip side of that story: the same patient search, far fewer bidders, a lower price.

A quick honesty check, because cheaper clicks are not the whole story. Bing sends less traffic than Google, so a lower price per click does not automatically mean a lower cost per booked patient. You could pay less per click and still land in a worse spot if the volume is too thin or the intent is off. That is why the only scoreboard that counts is cost per booked patient, measured on Bing by itself, not the click price a rep waves at you. When the audience fits, though, cheaper clicks plus fewer competitors often do add up to a lower cost per patient than Google alone.

The best part: you can copy your Google campaigns in minutes

The biggest reason practices skip Bing is not doubt, it is effort. Nobody wants to rebuild a whole ad account from scratch for a maybe. Good news: you do not have to. Microsoft Advertising has a built in import tool that pulls your existing Google Ads campaigns, keywords and ad copy across in a few clicks. Your best performing Google setup becomes your Bing starting point in an afternoon.

The catch, and there is always a catch, is that import is a starting line, not a finish line. The Bing audience is smaller and behaves a little differently, so you lower budgets to match the volume, keep an eye on which keywords actually convert, and manage it as its own channel with its own tracking. Set it, forget it, and blame Bing later is how the platform earns its bad reputation. Managed properly, it earns its keep.

Who should test Bing, and who should skip it

This is the part the internet usually gets wrong. Bing is not for everyone, and pretending it is would make us no better than the Yelp rep who calls every practice with the same pitch.

Good fit. Practices whose patients skew older or higher income. Audiology, cardiology, orthopedics, ophthalmology, pain management, vein and vascular care, dermatology for mature skin, dental implants, and anything tied to Medicare or retirement age. If your average patient is 50 plus, Bing is full of them, and hardly anyone is advertising to them there.

Weak fit. Practices that live on a younger crowd. A pediatric office, a college town clinic, a trend driven aesthetics brand chasing patients who found them on Instagram. That patient is not on Bing in the same numbers, and your money works harder on Google and social. If that is you, our guides on attracting younger patients and Google Ads versus Facebook Ads are the better reads.

Not yet. Any practice whose Google account is not yet fully working, or whose front desk drops calls. Bing is a way to stretch a budget that already performs. It is not a rescue for one that does not. First things first, in order.

Our honest opinion

Here is where we plant a flag. Bing is not a magic channel, and anyone who sells it to you as the secret Google killer is overselling. Google is still where most patients search, and it should still get the first and largest share of your ad budget. Full stop.

But we think most practices ignore Bing for a lazy reason, not a smart one. They skip it because it sounds unserious, not because they ran the math and it failed. That is the same mistake in reverse that makes people overpay on Google: following the crowd instead of following the cost per patient. For a practice serving older, higher income patients, carving off ten or fifteen percent of the ad budget to test Microsoft Advertising is one of the cheapest experiments in healthcare marketing. Worst case, you learn it does not fit your city and you shut it off next month. Best case, you find booked patients at a price your competitors do not even know exists, because they are all still fighting over the same Google click.

And whichever room you buy your ads in, the leak is almost never the channel. It is what happens after the phone rings. We have watched practices agonize over Google versus Bing while a third of the calls those ads created hit voicemail at lunch. You cannot out spend a front desk that does not answer. We wrote about that exact trap in why your ad clicks are not booking patients, and it undoes more ad budgets than any platform choice ever will.

How EtherealMinds handles this for practices

When we run paid acquisition for a practice, we do not start with a platform, we start with a patient. Who are they, how old, what do they search, and where does a booked appointment cost the least? For most clinics the answer leads with Google. But when the patient skews older and higher income, we will often test a slice of the budget on Microsoft Advertising, import the winning Google campaigns, and measure Bing on its own cost per booked patient. If it beats Google in that city, we scale it. If it does not, we shut it off. No loyalty to any platform, only to the math.

And we close the loop that wastes most ad money. Every call and form your spend creates gets answered, because our AI receptionist picks up day or night and books patients on the spot, even the 8pm caller who found you on a Windows laptop and would have hit voicemail anywhere else. Cheaper clicks only matter if someone catches the patient they bring.

So, should your medical practice advertise on Bing? If your patients trend older or more affluent, it is one of the smartest cheap tests you can run, as long as Google and your front desk are already handled. If your crowd is young, put that money elsewhere. Advertise where your patients actually are, count what a booked patient really costs, and stop letting a funny sounding name hide a room full of people nobody else is talking to.