Bing Attracts New Searchers, But So Far Only For a Trial
Written by Alex Patriquin (contact - e-mail) -- June 11th, 2009 |
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Unless you’re completely new to the internet industry, or have been on vacation for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard a lot about Bing, Microsoft’s slick new search engine.
On June 1st, Microsoft officially launched Bing with $100M ad campaign, including TV commercials, and started redirecting traffic from Live Search and vertical search engines like Farecast over to Bing.com.
So how’s it going? At first glance, not too bad.
One week since launching, Bing has raised Microsoft’s searcher penetration by 2.3ppts to 11.4%.
We trended the daily change in searcher penetration over the past week to show how marketing and buzz around the Bing launch has greatly extended the reach it inherited from MSN/Live.
A 2.3ppt improvement on a 9.1% penetration base is impressive. Yet this uptick hasn’t come at the expense of Google or Yahoo!, which have maintained searcher penetration since Bing’s launch.
New searchers are exploring Bing, but they haven’t forsaken their preferred engines and made the switch completely.
That’s also evident in a critical engagement metric: queries per searcher. Bing has significantly dropped Microsoft’s average queries per searcher since launch.
Prior to Bing’s launch, Microsoft maintained an average 5.2 queries per searcher. Since Bing’s launch, the average has dropped by 1.3 queries or 25%, with millions dropping by just to perform a couple of trial queries.
Those trial searchers haven’t produced significant enough volume to impact the established market share of the top engines, which account for more than 12 billion queries, according to Compete’s panel.
Since Bing’s launch, the average daily market share of the top engines has remained essentially unchanged. If anything, the day of week fluctuations in Google’s massive query base has overshadowed Microsoft’s uptick from Bing’s launch.
So Bing has had great success in attracting new searchers, but these have been dabblers that have not given up on their old engines (yet) and not generated enough queries to move the needle.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be watching Bing to see where these dabblers are coming from (Google? Yahoo!?) and, critically, if they will return to Bing for more than just a trial run.
Did you like that post? You'll love these.
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- Did You Google Bing?
- July Search Market Share: Bing Continues to Gain Share but Paid Referrals Flatten Out
- September Search Share: The Bing train keeps rolling but not at Google’s expense
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June 11th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Hey Alex,
It would be great to see some info on the abandonment rates for Bing vs. Live vs. MSN (May) vs. Other SEs.
Thanks!
June 11th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Bing is truly the best, I could never return to Google..
I love to shop and click :)
June 11th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
I gave Bing a try, I still preferred Google. I’m surprised that 22% prefer Yahoo!
June 12th, 2009 at 7:07 am
I have been using Bing since early June as my primary search engine, and works great. I no longer use no. 1, and so far do not miss it. I like Bing’s video search capability too. For now I will stick with Bing, so long as it is continually improved. If it remains static, which is essentially what happened with MS Live, then at some point I will dump it. But for now it is Bing all the time. BING!!!
June 12th, 2009 at 10:12 am
There was a report from some hit counter site which said that Microsoft had briefly overtaken Yahoo as the no.2 search engine. Is that true, or was it just hype?
June 12th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
I tried it for the first time last evening and was totally impressed not only by how different it is from the others, but by what it can do!
June 13th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
I have to say “I don’t get it.” I’m very confused by the image of Miami on the Bing homepage. I’ll admit that, as a marketer, I’m not as up as I might like to be on their overall strategy and the features of Bing. But perhaps that puts me at an advantage here - able to look at this new offering through the lens of the average web consumer who hasn’t read all of the hype about Bing. I went to the site cold with no preconceived ideas of what Microsoft was trying to do and, frankly, the imagery and subject matter of the homepage left me completely confused. With the exception of the search box, I really didn’t know what I was looking at. Is this a travelogue? Is it the search theme for the month? Is it microsoft’s way of combining freshness and randomness with some visual demonstration of the power of its search relevance? Like some combination of a visual “stumbleupon” and Google’s practice of subverting their logo.
June 27th, 2009 at 3:24 am
I am confused by the conclusion reached in this blog post. I thought one of bing’s features was that it was *supposed* to reduce the number of queries a user had to perform to get to the information they needed.
The “Queries per Searcher” graph shows to me that they succeeded in this goal.
July 21st, 2009 at 12:13 pm
What amazes me is that the big three SE’s seem to offer very similar results. I can understand when looking for Obama or Travel, that this makes sense. But as an example of a very long tail KW mid atlantic geography comes up in the same #1 or #2 slot on all the big SE - and represents about 20 searches a week. That is about as long tail as you can get - yet Bing, Yahoo and Google give very similar results.