June Search Market Share: Bing Shines in a Rough June for Search
Written by Alex Patriquin (contact - e-mail) -- July 13th, 2009 | Share - Save - E-mailWhat does $100 million advertising budget and mountains of PR get you? If you’re Microsoft launching a new search engine, the answer is becoming clearer. In its first month on the job, Bing has raised Microsoft’s search market share by 0.3pts to 6.5%. That might not seem like much, but keep in mind two key points.
First, Bing’s major gains came in the last week of June. Microsoft started TV advertising for Bing earlier in the month, but ad viewers may have taken a few exposures to get the message.
Second, June was a down month for search engines across the board. The overall search market fell by 1.7% and Google lost 0.9% query volume. The Live/Bing tag team, unlike every other search engine, served up more queries last month than it did in May – 19 million more to be exact.
In other words, Bing was the only bright spot in an otherwise rough June for search.
Bing also raised Microsoft’s rate of Sponsored Referrals to 5.6%, as expected. In June, Bing yielded 80% more “paid clicks” than MSN/Live did in May.
Let me repeat that: Bing yielded 80% more “paid clicks” last month than MSN/Live did in May. Given this fact, it’s highly likely that Bing will raise Microsoft’s overall search revenue, even though revenue per paid click may go down.
In terms of user experience, Bing has also won some high praise. Yesterday, David Pogue from the New York Times said, “In a lot of ways, Bing is better than Google.”
But praise has stopped short of handing Bing the gold in user experience, with reviewers pointing out that Bing borrows many features from Google and Ask. In a head-to-head matchup, Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land wrote, “Bing isn’t 50% better than Google.”
Now everyone knows the true test of Bing begins after Microsoft’s ad campaign wraps up.
And observers are right to be skeptical. A couple of years ago, IAC also spent $100 million on advertising Ask. Today, Ask holds on to its meager market share for dear life, having slipped 13.3% over the past year.
To grossly misquote the Talking Heads, “after the money’s gone” will it be “same as it ever was”?
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- Did You Google Bing?
- July Search Market Share: Bing Continues to Gain Share but Paid Referrals Flatten Out
- May Search Market Share: Pre-Bing Launch, Sponsored Referrals Dip at MSN/Live
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July 13th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
I think you guys meant to write Microsoft – instead of Micosoft in the charts.
July 13th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
Hi,
just found your interesting monthly data. To understand it: does the ’sponsored referrals’ for jun-09 Google of 6.1% share means that out of avery 100 search queries 6.1 clicks go to the Adwords?
If so, do you also have data for the clicks on the organic results? I found your post on ’search delivery’ that says for google 50 out of avery 100 queries results in a click. So with above data ratios its possible to get ctrs for organic and paid search?
July 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Hi Keesjan,
Google’s sponsored referral rate in June was 6.1%, which means that for every 100 referrals from Google, roughly 6 were clicks on sponsored search results (delivered by the AdWords program) and 94 were clicks on organic or algorithmic results.
For more on the difference between queries and referrals, please see my post last month. http://blog.compete.com/2009/06/10/may-search-market-share-sponsored-referrals-google-yahoo-msn-bing/
Earlier this year, Google maintained a roughly 65% query/referral rate, which means that for every 100 queries there were roughly 65 referrals. This could be due to a variety of factors including queries being answered on the results page, without need for a referral, or searchers refining their queries to be more specific.
Thanks,
Alex
July 14th, 2009 at 12:37 am
June Search Market Share : Bing was up only by 1 million searches
Bing was up from 6.2% to 6.5%, a tiny 0.3% gain. Did that hurt Google? Nope. Google rose from 73.3% to 73.9%, a 0.6% gain. Down were Yahoo and Ask, both losing 0.4% in share. AOL was unchanged (and barely registers at 0.8%).
Google dropped from 9.145 …
July 14th, 2009 at 12:42 am
Bing to the tune of Michael Jackson’s Ben:
“Bing, the two of us need look no more
We both found what we were looking for.”
Haha… I wish I could sing that song to Bing.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:30 am
Nothing’s ever the same after the money’s one. Add to that the fast dissappearing ‘newness’ factor, and you’re going to see a big drop in Bing’s bling in the next few months. But their improvement in paid clicks is nevertheless impressive.
July 14th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Google is an amazing company and I dont think they will have to worry about Bing, from what I remember Google owns 81% of the search market and 32% of all internet traffic. I still support Google all the way.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:48 pm
Only time will tell if Bing will survive. More data is needed and a longer time span to determine this.
July 15th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
so far i like bing more than friggin google!
July 15th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
how does the market share total to over 100% in June?
July 16th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I don’t really think you will see a dip in Bing’s success anytime soon. Microsoft has made it pretty clear that they are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure it thrives right now and I imagine that won’t just be a two-month plan. By the time they stop putting so much money into it, I think they will at least remain steady if not on some sort of continued incline depending on how much they continue to evolve. It’s just that there has been a lot of hype and a lot of positive reviews to the point that I don’t see it dropping.
The paid clicks increase must be a very pleasing development for Microsoft since it seemed pretty apparent they redesigned things to better suit advertisers with the top-heavy placing of results, etc. Plus, the overall search market fell with Bing still gaining. If it picks back up (which will probably happen sooner than later), who knows what can happen then. Bing still has lots of work to do though.
I’d like to encourage those interested in search to check out eZanga.com. It’s constantly improving and experiencing rapid growth in recent months. Definitely worth the look.
July 22nd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
The deviation of 1.7% in search volume, how significant is that? What is the normal deviation?
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