Eustondigital blog

Do we like Bing?

Research from Hitwise UK out this week shows how well Microsoft’s the new search engine ‘Bing’ is getting on in the UK. We all know how well the US has taken to it. But whilst Americans are bombarded with a $100m advertising campaign for the new engine, over here we’ve had to be content with a few niche press releases.

The UK stats show that following the official June 3rd launch Bing’s market share grew significantly. If you exclude Google US and UK, Bing was the third ranked search engine, making up almost 11% of the UK market. After the launch hype, traffic has declined although the average length of visit has grown to over 8 minutes.

And what are people looking for on Bing? Well the top search term for the week ending 6th June was ‘facebook’, which made up 3.94% of all searches.

Branded terms (those that include a company or product name) make up the other big numbers (as usual), but despite that there are 5 generic terms in Bing’s top 100.

More of a concern for Bing is that a significant proportion of its ‘downstream’ traffic – those websites that people visit after having been on Bing -were other search engines. This suggests that people tried Bing our before returning to their favourite search engine.

And another concern for Bing is who they are stealing market share from. Most people visiting Bing came from MSN UK- another of Microsoft’s search engines. There’s obviously not a lot of point in building a brand new search engine if the only people who end up using it were previously customers of your other search engine. Microsoft would clearly rather convert users from Google and Yahoo.

Here’s a graph showing UK visits to Bing, from Hitwise.

Have you tried Bing yet? If so, what do you think? And how does your website rank well in Bing’s Search Engine Results Page? Leave us a comment below.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 12:38 pm and is filed under PPC, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.