subject: Click Through Rates for Bing and Google [print this page] Click Through Rates for Bing and Google Click Through Rates for Bing and Google
While Google still dominates the Search Engine world, Bing has been making some quiet noise ever since its introduction, slowly increasing market share each month. Some Internet experts feel Google's soon to be released "Caffeine" search engine is in part a response to Bing. If you search the net you'll find some SEO professionals who have been able to test the impact of Caffeine are using Bing results as comparison benchmarks. Let's look at another significant, and perhaps more meaningful, Bing versus Google comparison.
Chitka Research: July 2009
Online advertising network, Chitka, thought it might be interesting to compare click through rates (CTR) of Bing users versus Google users. Bing was introduced with a massive media advertising campaign touting Bing as the "world's first decision engine." What they found was stunning and surprising. Users who arrive at a site via Bing click the ads placed on the site a full 50% per cent more than users arriving at the page via Google. These numbers do not reflect the entire Internet, only sites serviced by Chitka. Researchers attributed the results to the ad campaign which, with its extensive use of television ads, was reaching huge numbers of existing frequent Internet visitors, as well as less active Internet visitors.
Chitka Research: December 2009
As all good researchers should do, the folks at Chitka decided to follow up and see how Bing was doing after the initial excitement of a new kid on the search engine block had faded away a bit. Surprise, surprise; Bing users showing up at Chitka serviced sites are now clicking through the ads on those pages 75%more than Google users! Some look at these numbers with a high degree of skepticism since there are so many more Google users than Bing users to start with. Others are not so sure. One could interpret these numbers to mean that, in terms of getting users to actually see your ads, aBing user may actually be more beneficial to you than a Google user.
Marketing Implications
Go to the Chitka web site and see the results of this study and you'll find some more surprising results. Both Ask users and AOL users actually click through more frequently than Bing users. AOL users apparently click through at the highest rate -- 2.5% versus Google's .98%. But again, AOL only has 1% of the overall search market. So why bother with Bing and AOL when Google has 84% of the market? One way to look at is that for every 100 Google driven visitors to your site, only one is going to click the ads while two and a half users out of 100 coming from AOL will click through. The point of placing those ads is for people to click on them. Wouldn't it make sense to invest a little effort into driving more AOL and Ask and Bing visitors to your sites? In today's Internet world Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has really evolved to Google Engine Optimization.
If you're involved in SEO in any way you probably know about long tail keyword research. In a classic bell curve distribution of keywords, the shorter generic phrases dominate the middle but in the "long tail" of the distribution there are many combinations of keywords which, while entered less frequently, yield a user much more likely to click through and convert. Researchers estimate click through from long tail searches as high as 200%! Many SEO professionals are getting into optimizing sites for long tail keywords since that kind of conversion leads to better overall return on investment. Wouldn't it also make sense to optimize for search engines like AOL, ASK, and Bing since their users have higher conversion rates as well?
