Bing Users' Click-Through Rate 55% Higher Than Google Users' 268
An anonymous reader writes "Techcrunch is running a story that shows some pretty significant differences in the clicking habits of users of Yahoo, Google, and Bing. As it turns out, folks who arrive at websites via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google (data based on the Chitika network). Essentially, people who use Bing are far more susceptible to advertising. Bing has acquired a decent market share in such a short time, but could it just be that they've reaped the low hanging fruit of those particularly persuaded by advertising? When their huge marketing campaign winds down, what kind of staying power will it have?"
The ads are not presented as ads (Score:1, Informative)
Can someone tell me how this higher click-through is some sort of a discovery? Bing integrates the ads into the search results. That is why it is smarter to use google - at least with google you can opt not to click on the ad.
Show me where the ad is. [bing.com] What? You can't tell? Me either - so don't use Bing.
Re:What a surprise (Score:1, Informative)
Why is it inferior? Because it has the Microsoft name attached to it? I would invite you to take the blind search test to see which search engine is really the best for you: http://blindsearch.fejus.com/ [fejus.com]
Re:Something fishy about Bing (Score:5, Informative)
Google Analytics had the same issue for the first few days after Bing was released.
Bing seems to be used by idiots (Score:5, Informative)
I've noticed a *lot* of Bing referrals in my access stats lately.
Almost all of them have, rather bizzarely, been one-word search strings. Here's my bing searches from the current first screen of my access stats, I swear this is genuine:
- keyboard
- gahhh
- really
- email
- comment
- worked
- image
So of the last 20 referrals to me, 7 have come from bing. That's impressive. All seven have clearly been done by people with zero ability to use search engines effectively.
I've tried bing out and found it to be lousy at finding what I'm looking for. I've also got huge amounts of crud like the above filling up my referral logs. I'm seriously considering blocking referrals from bing.com just to stop it clogging up my stats.
Do I think Google should be worried? Not yet, no..
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Informative)
I have tested it on a bunch of target search phrases relevant to my business and the results that Bing produces are plainly inferior. It weights substrings in a URL much more highly than Google does and seems to significantly discount anything that looks like inbound link count/quality.
For certain types of queries that aren't in business areas where search engine traffic is competitive, maybe that will produce better results. But in the areas I looked it, it produces garbage.
Re:What a surprise (Score:2, Informative)
Referrer spamming (Score:1, Informative)
It seems that bing does some referrer spamming, probably while crawling your site. I've just noticed that today, but I'm not the only one it seems: http://www.the-art-of-web.com/system/logs-bing/ [the-art-of-web.com]
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Then I decided to do another search, of SNES to see how well both engines did with acronyms. Bing ended up with a typical first segment, until you got down to suggestions of "SNES games"... However they were all NES related(!) totally different than what I was searching for. Than about half the "suggested" results were of things for the NES(!) which is totally different. For example the suggestions for "SNES Repair" ended up with pages about how to repair the NES. Google's results were typical, mods, ROMs and general history of the SNES with no mention of the NES in the first 3 pages.
Re:Bing l10n.. (Score:5, Informative)
Set your Google link to "http://www.google.com/ncr" and you will get the default English page no matter what prefs you set or where you are.
Re:The reason (Score:5, Informative)
The really funny thing about this comment is that it was labeled informative...
I agree. "Informative" is for a post providing new information. It should have been "Insightful".
Re:Slimy Submission Text (Score:1, Informative)
No one should buy anything from a advertisement, they should look into what they want/need themselves and make an informed decision on what product to go with.
If you buy a product from a advertisement it is most likely going to have a lesser quality/price ratio then an item you find on your own that does the same thing, but the company does not spend millions on advertising it.
Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots (Score:5, Informative)
Funny you mention that, here's my results (and our server is VERY heavily hit):
Only the first (eclug) and last (terrorism) are really directly relevant to topics on sites I host. Compare that with some Google search results:
90% of the search queries by Google users are directly relevant. bing.com is just throwing random garbage around, it seems.
Re:Something fishy about Bing (Score:1, Informative)
Just like live.com, bing.com's bots send you some ref spam from a specific ip range. They claim it's cloak detection. However, no other search engine vendor does something like that.
Use their feedback form to complain. If enough people do it they will maybe stop being assholes.
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030514035516436 [macosxhints.com]
It's just Mac & Linux users can, on occasion, manage to do something without a GUI. I'm not saying all Windows users can't, but that huge slice of market share Windows users brag about all the time includes a lot of really dumb people.
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
Microsoft users (Score:1, Informative)
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Informative)
No, he's referring to the browser's search box.
Have you even fucking seen the browser?
... Yeah, it's typically located to the right of the "Address" bar. Are you losing your cool because I called it a toolbar and not a box? Because that's what it looks like to me.
Tell ya what, cut+paste my post into a word processor. Do a search-and-replace to replace every occurrence of "toolbar" with "box". Note that none of the points I was making changes in any way. I have a feeling you aren't sharing my amusement at this. Too bad, that's your loss.
If you don't know that you wrote a troll post, now you do. If you did know that, you should know I've dealt with trolls far, far more effective and convincing than you. The best of them manage to be humorous instead of bitching about semantics. Ah well, to each his own.
Re:Slimy Submission Text (Score:1, Informative)
By low-hanging fruit, I really didn't mean that to be offensive... but I can see how that could be misinterpreted. I certainly did not mean to make any claims about intelligence, tech-savvy-ness, or anything else you might have interpreted that comment as. Nor was I making any accusations for or against Microsoft or the folks who use their products.
I simply meant that the dramatic rise in market share can be attributed to Microsoft's huge ad campaign, and that their rate of growth is probably unsustainable. The market share they have, one can argue based on the data, is the portion of the market share that is easy to acquire. i.e., they are the people who are not loyal to any particular product, and can instead be persuaded in one direction or another with greater success with advertising.
If Yahoo or Google or anyone else launched even greater marketing campaigns, many of the new Bing users may be lost as quickly as they were gained. Again, sorry if anyone found this offensive....
Re:What a surprise (Score:4, Informative)
Ads placed on Google and Bing's search result pages are, at the present, wholly billed on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis.
So one could conject that ROI may be a lot higher at Bing right now because of lack of competition (CPC is generally a loosely auction-driven model), but the volume to sustain your business is still at Google.
Re:What a surprise (Score:3, Informative)