Microsoft is receiving more paid clicks thanks to Bing, its new search engine, but still lags behind Yahoo and Google in overall paid clicks, according to an analysis by search engine marketing company Efficient Frontier. Microsoft's paid clicks increased by around 15 percent in the first two weeks of Bing's release, Efficient Frontier says.Microsoft's
share of paid clicks has been expanding in the two weeks following the release
of Bing, its new search engine, according to an analysis conducted by search
engine marketing company Efficient Frontier.
Backed by an advertising budget reportedly in the $80 million to $100
million range, Bing combines traditional keyword search with the ability to
drill down into specific categories such as "Images" and
"Shopping."
"Having seen ComScore's release that Bing's searcher penetration rose
again in the second week after launch," Efficient Frontier wrote in a June
23 corporate blog post, "we were curious if our data would show Bing's
click share gains expanding, holding or falling back to previous levels."
That report
by research company ComScore found solid numbers in Bing's second week, with its daily penetration among U.S.
searchers increasing by three percentage points to 16.7 percent. During that
same period, the study also found, Microsoft's share of U.S.
search result pages increased to 12.1 percent, up three points over the
weeklong period before Bing's June 1 release.
In a note accompanying that report, Mike Hurt, senior vice president of
ComScore, wrote, "The ultimate performance of Bing depends on the extent
to which it generates more trial [users] through its extensive launch campaign
and whether it retains those trial users."
According to Efficient Frontier's analysis, in its second week Bing expanded
Microsoft's share of paid clicks by 13 percent in its second week of release
when compared with the company's share in the immediate prelaunch period. In
turn, this 13 percent represents a five-point rise over the 8 percent click increase
of Bing's first week.
"As we mentioned in our last post, if Bing's click share gains hold we
expect advertisers to allocate additional budget to Microsoft," Efficient
Frontier's blog post said, cautioning: "However two weeks does not make
a trend." The company also noted that Microsoft continues to lag behind
Yahoo and Google in overall paid clicks.
Publicly, Microsoft seems happy so far with Bing's impact on the market.
"We have had some very good initial response," Microsoft CEO
Steve Ballmer reportedly told the National Summit in Detroit
on June 17. "I don't want to over-set expectations. We are going to have
to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of
time."
However, some of Ballmer's fellow corporate titans appear to feel that Bing
will ultimately be unable to retain that momentum in the search engine wars.
"They're not going to get scale through Bing," Carol
Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, said during the Bank of America and Merrill Lynch U.S.
Technology Conference in New York on June 3. She further suggested that
interest in the search engine would be "temporary."
Whether temporary or not, public interest in Bing seems to have reversed a
stagnant-to-declining trend in Microsoft's search fortunes.
In April, previous to Bing's launch, a ComScore report found that Google
held about 64.2 percent of the U.S.
core search engine market, while Yahoo came in second with 20.4 percent of the
market and Microsoft third with 8.2 percent. A report by Nielsen found that Microsoft's
share of the market previous to Bing had dropped 14.6 percent between May 2008
and May 2009.
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