$8K a month on Bing Ads, zero tracked conversions — 147 found in month one

The situation

A US consumer legal services firm was running $40K/month on Google and $8K/month on Bing. Google was performing well. Bing showed exactly zero conversions every single month — not low, not poor, just zero. Their previous agency labeled Bing as "not working" and recommended cutting it. Before they did, they hired me to confirm.

The problem

The Universal Event Tracking tag had been installed through GTM in 2023 — but the trigger was set to fire on All Pages as a pageview, not on the confirmation page as a conversion. Additionally, a second UET goal in Microsoft Ads had a URL destination rule pointing to the intake form page instead of the confirmation page. The result: zero conversions were ever recorded in Bing while real consultations and signed cases came through every month. The campaign ran on Maximize Clicks with no conversion data for 11 months.

What we did

1. Audited the GTM container — found the UET tag firing on All Pages with no conversion trigger
2. Reviewed Microsoft Ads goal settings — destination URL rule pointed to the form page, not the confirmation page
3. Rebuilt the UET conversion tag in GTM with the correct trigger: fires only on the case inquiry confirmation URL
4. Implemented Microsoft Enhanced Conversions — hashed customer email passed to Bing to improve cross-device attribution
5. Switched from Maximize Clicks to Target CPA bidding once 30 days of clean conversion data accumulated

Why it worked

Bing is the most consistently under-tracked platform I audit. Because it's a secondary channel, implementation gets less attention — and errors go unnoticed for months. In this case the real story was even more compelling: Bing's audience (older, higher income, professional) converted at a lower CPA than Google for legal services. Eleven months of that performance had been invisible. The fix took 4 hours.