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Bing Users' Click-Through Rate 55% Higher Than Google Users'
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?"
It is just that your version of awstats is too old to recognize that Bing is a search engine. There is no technical distinction between a site referral and a search referral. Search engines are just individually filtered from the rest of the results by the stats software.
Google Analytics had the same issue for the first few days after Bing was released.
eclecti.cc
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..
So.. it has come to this
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.
Right, so Google hasn't completely rebranded their "core product", but it's not like they're inactive on that front. See: Suggest, uber Search Options, and - what's this? - Searchology? An event "to update our users, partners, and customers on the progress we have made in search and tell them about new features"?
I don't know, but I've found myself pretty happy with Google's search. I've used Bing and can't find any difference other than the fact that Bing randomly decides what it thinks i'm meaning and tries to give me those results. When usually its wrong. With Google I basically get the information I need quickly, with Bing I have to wade through all kinds of "suggestions" that are usually wrong. For example, because it was on its main page as a "featured search" I typed in mosquito bite. I got 5 results on the actual mosquito bite and then other "suggestions" of first aid, symptoms, news, treatments, etc. Google's was a bit better, with actual results (though it did have a few YouTube videos, news and images mixed in) but it didn't try to suggest me what it thought I meant which is nice.
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.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
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".
Yes you can:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030514035516436
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.
For starters its auto suggest brings up "linux microsoft", "linux windows" and "linux vista" as the first 3 suggestions when searching for Linux. There are other auto suggestions that are a bit off and considering the company I think it's probably more than coincidence that it happens.
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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.
That could be it. If you type "bash c" into bing, it suggests the only practical programming a windows fan is likely to understand.
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.