Apparently all the kiddos heading back to school are not turning to search engines to do their homework. Overall September web search activity remained at seasonal lows with no strong indication of recovery. In September, online users submitted 200MM less queries than they did in August. The majority of this decline came from Yahoo! (serving 100 MM less queries in September than August or an 8% decline).

Continue reading “September Search Share: The Bing train keeps rolling but not at Google’s expense” »

Search Share

Since its launch at the beginning of June, Microsoft’s Bing has been gaining traction in the search realm, and is proving itself to be a viable competitor to Yahoo! and Google. Bing has seen increase in its search volume for the past three months straight. Out of the “big five engines” Bing and AOL are the only ones who can make that claim. In terms of core search growth, Bing stands out.

Bing’s search share continues to rise and now stands at 8.5% when including Club Bing. The majority of Bing’s increase came from growth in core search which continued growing at .3ppt this month. While AOL and Yahoo! can barely show growth from last year, Ask, Google and Bing all enjoy double digit search volume growth Y-O-Y. Out of those three Bing is currently leading the pack with 29.7% Y-O-Y growth in its core search volume. Google served up 200 million less queries in August compared to July, dropping its search share to 72.3% when taking into account Club Bing.

Bing makes gain in Paid Clicks

Last month we reported that Bing wasn’t able to convert its search share growth into more paid clicks, but we cannot say the same this month. Not only did we see Bing increase its paid search share by .2ppt in August, the share of Bing users who perform a paid click and the rate at which Bing users perform paid clicks, are all up for the past three months.

Google has hovered around 6.2% share of paid clicks for the past 3 months. In terms of paid clicks per user, Google still dominates the field with an average of 4+ paid clicks per user. Yahoo! is second in this category, with an average of 1.6 paid clicks per user in August. When Bing launched in June, Bing saw an immediate 30% spike in paid clicks per users. While growth has slowed since then, Bing is still increasing the number of paid clicks by 5% in each of the past two months. This is a sign that Bing is doing a good job at providing relevant paid links that capture the eyes and intentions of the user

It will be interesting to see if this summer’s decline in search volume will recover in September. Could a short hiatus from searching cause a user to explore a new engine (Bing?) when they get back?

So now that we are two months into the Bing launch, where has the $100 million ad budget and loads of PR coverage gotten Microsoft? Well on many fronts Bing seems to winning a few hearts and minds but regarding the bottomline connections it’s a little less straight forward. Bing continued to build Microsoft’s search share, but paid search clicks didn’t grow at the same rate.

Last month we told you that this .3ppt increase was impressive because the Search industry as a whole struggled. This month we unfortunately can’t make the same claim; in a month where the industry grew query volume as a whole, we would have expected Bing to have more than just a flat growth rate. Still growth in any form is a good thing compared to the trends we were looking at for Live Search a few months ago.

Google’s market share grew a solid 12.8% from this time last year, remaining at roughly 74%. Yahoo! was the biggest loser this month in terms of search share, declining 1% since June.

Ask led the field with 48% month-over-month growth in volume, but this growth was needed simply to make up for the previous two months of losses. Additionally, it is important to keep in mind that as impressive as 48% M-O-M growth sounds, that only accounts for a little over 100 million queries; hardly a drop in the total queries bucket that saw over 12.5 billion queries served up in July.

Google had a slight gain in sponsored click rate with a .13 ppt increase. While this might not sound like much, Google generates over 6 billion referrals each month, so that increase accounts for millions of additional paid clicks, which is nothing to scoff at.

We did not see the same uptick for Bing, which despite increased search share saw a slight decline in paid clicks. After strong growth in the sponsored referral rate in June, Bing lost .1 ppt in July. We saw a surprising jump in Ask’s paid clicks last month as well, but unfortunately like Bing, Ask was unable to convert its query share gain into growth in paid clicks and this month slipped back to 2008 levels. It is important to note that paid click performance is effected by a number of other factors out of Bing’s and Ask’s control. Bad advertising is still bad advertising even if you slap it on a Ferrari.

It will be interesting to see how the announced Yahoo! search and Bing partnership will pan out. Success will depend on Bing’s ability to keep increasing its search share, while Yahoo! will need to bring high quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks.

Although Dr. Bernanke is confident that the U.S. economy is on the road to recovery, we expect online advertisers to continue keeping a close eye on their minimized budgets until there are promising signs of increased consumer spending. Will the engines use this opportunity to do more with less and increase the effectiveness of their paid clicks? You know we’ll be watching and reporting!