One Bing-er Worth a Googler and a Half
July 27th, 2010
Although Microsoft’s Bing “decision engine” has hit many bumps in the road in growing its market share, there’s one thing it’s done extremely well: it’s pulled in some of the most valuable segments of the online traffic. A new study by online ad network Chitika shows that an individual Bing user is worth one and a half individual Google users in value to website owners.
The value of an individual user, in this case, is determined by their likelihood to click on a website’s revenue-generating call-to-action – in Chitika’s case, a text ad embedded in the site. Across the sample of nearly 15 million impressions used for this study, Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time.
“Microsoft absolutely did the right thing by targeting people who buy online,” says Alden DoRosario, Chitika’s co-founder and CTO. “Bing’s Cashback service did its job, and ensured that people who were using search with a clear intent to buy came to Bing.”
Across the Chitika network, the amount of Web traffic driven by Bing has been increasing steadily throughout 2010 – from 4.4% of traffic generated in April to 6.6% thus far in July – and that growth, combined with the higher per-user value, means that Bing should no longer be an afterthought for SEO gurus and webmasters.
Contact:
Daniel Ruby
Research Director, Online Insights
Chitika, Inc.
+866.441.7203 x966
press@chitika.com
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You are completely misinterpreting the data. Bing users, for the most part, come from two sources. The first group are people that use the default search engine that ships with Windows. The second group are people that use the MSN portal that is the default home page for Windows. These users tend to be the least sophisticated computer users. What you are observing is a demographic effect. You observed the same thing with IE (default browser) vs. Firefox (requires computer savvy) — people that use Windows defaults are unsophisticated and therefore valuable. From an advertiser perspective, they prefer customers who don’t realize they are clicking on an ad. This latest result can in no way be attributed to Bing’s marketing campaign as the same (higher ad click rates) was true in the Live search era. Ask has the most coveted search demographic — dial up modem users.
Hehe, took the words right out my mouth hardtke.
I USE BING I AM PRETTY LITERATE ABOUT THE COMPUTERS. PROBABLY THAT IS THE REASON BIHIND ME USING BING AS ITS A NEW AND REFRESHING TECHNOLOGY AND PERFORMS BETTER THAN GOOGLE FOR ABOUT 70% OF THE SEARCHES. GOOGLE IS OLD AND ROTTEN TECHNOLOGY WHICH PEOPLE MOSTLY USE BECAUSE THEY ARE HABITUAL TO IT AND ARE NOT THAT COMPUTER LITERATES TO ACTUALLY GET EXITED ABOUT NEW TECHNOLOGY ON THE OFFER. WITH NEW INVENTIONS BY MICROSOFT IN MAPS AND VERTICALS GOOGLE IS RED FACED AND JEALOUS AND IS SHAMELESSLY COPING BING LEFT RIGHT AND CENTRE, WHICH SUBSTANTIATE THE BETTER TECHNOLOGY AND USER INTERFACE OF BING.
hardtke, you’re dead on in my opinion.