Hi, all! I’ve put out a few research studies showing that Bing traffic converts better than Google traffic, and always the response from publishers has been: “Great, now what do I do?” How do you optimize your website to increase your traffic from Bing specifically?
Well, last week I attended SMX West in San Jose, and had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing Sasi Parthasarasy, one of the brilliant minds behind Bing, and asked him just that. Let’s see his response:
Thanks Sasi for your candor, and your advice. You heard the man, folks: secure up those sites, and blow readers away with awesome content!
The power of bundled software can be an amazing thing – all three major operating systems have a bundled Internet browser, each of which has 73% of their OS’s Internet usage (based on a sample of 163 million US/Canada impressions across the Chitika network in early August). But Bing, the decision engine Microsoft bundles with Internet Explorer, only gets 10.3% of IE users’ searches.
Microsoft has long been known as the king of bundling, with the assumption that bundling creates market share. But now, it seems that crown has moved to Google, the default search engine – and 89.57% of the search market – in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome.
And while Bing has received quite a bit of good reviews, publicity, and advertising, it is still struggling, even with Microsoft Internet Explorer users, falling in at third place on the search rankings behind Google and Yahoo!
Microsoft has a lot of work to do in order to take any significant market share away from Google, but if they use their experience in bundling software, it appears that the opportunity is there to jump up to a majority of users.
The Raw Numbers:
Windows
Google
Yahoo
Bing
AOL
Total Search
%
IE
76,712,986
12,168,239
10,686,158
2,040,240
103,392,630
72.37%
Chrome
4,332,212
10,090
78,240
4,585
4,451,939
3.12%
Firefox
29,731,411
2,530,000
651,709
158,157
33,451,586
23.41%
Safari
768,341
70,801
11,049
1,207
857,436
0.60%
Other
654,419
34,471
9,395
1,303
711,756
0.50%
Total
112,199,369
14,813,601
11,436,551
2,205,492
142,865,347
100.00%
%
78.54%
10.37%
8.01%
1.54%
100.00%
Linux
Google
Yahoo
Bing
AOL
Total Search
%
IE
677
56
3
0
746
0.06%
Chrome
10,909
2
53
0
10,980
0.94%
Firefox
812,169
34,712
7,765
696
861,840
73.43%
Safari
198,586
3,495
451
67
203,994
17.38%
Other
88,193
2,565
772
28
96,201
8.20%
Total
1,110,534
40,830
9,044
791
1,173,761
100.00%
%
94.61%
3.48%
0.77%
0.07%
100.00%
Mac
Google
Yahoo
Bing
AOL
Total Search
%
IE
2,723
191
272
15
3,246
0.02%
Chrome
4,074
4
37
0
4,129
0.02%
Firefox
4,630,253
175,240
52,938
5,746
4,901,368
26.89%
Safari
12,252,530
725,474
152,603
29,885
13,249,869
72.69%
Other
62,850
2,798
534
2,427
69,887
0.38%
Total
16,952,430
903,707
206,384
38,073
18,228,499
100.00%
%
93.00%
4.96%
1.13%
0.21%
100.00%
*The percentages of search don’t add up to 100% because of a small number of Ask.com searches which weren’t included in this table.
We at Chitika are quite fond of search engines: since all of our ads serve only to search traffic, they’re our bread and butter in the online world. So with Microsoft’s new Bing decision engine making so much noise, we thought we’d take a closer look at the clickthrough rates of visitors from the three major search players: Yahoo!, Google, and Bing.
“Bing!” That sound is a brand new search engine (sorry, “Decision Engine”) from Microsoft leaping into the fray and making everyone’s life a little more Microsoft-y. Launched in late May, Bing has started taking searches away from reigning powerhouses Google and Yahoo! – and it works great with Chitika | Premium ads.
As much as we love search, and as much as we live by the power of search engines, you didn’t really think we’d be unable to serve ads to Bing traffic, did you? It’s an exciting new tool that Microsoft hopes will revolutionize the way people search on the Internet. We’re all over that.
Plus, when I went to grab this screenshot, they had a picture of Boston (where Chitika lives) as the main image. It was like fate telling us “Yeah, Chitika and Bing work well together.”
So, if your site is getting traffic from Bing, that’s great – your Chitika | Premium ads will continue to show up and be exactly what your site visitors are searching for.
