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Bing Users' Click-Through Rate 55% Higher Than Google Users'

Posted by timothy on from the hey-now-I-like-that-ads-subsidize-stuff dept.

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?"

5 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Something fishy about Bing by PaintyThePirate · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Bing seems to be used by idiots by oneandoneis2 · · Score: 4, 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..

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    So.. it has come to this
    1. Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots by hacker · · Score: 4, Informative

      Funny you mention that, here's my results (and our server is VERY heavily hit):

      • eclug
      • INSTALATION
      • linux
      • meeting
      • message
      • printing
      • services
      • terrorism

      Only the first (eclug) and last (terrorism) are really directly relevant to topics on sites I host. Compare that with some Google search results:

      • cool
      • copy
      • desktop
      • gnu
      • html
      • LinkPilot
      • mobile
      • palm
      • pilot
      • plucker
      • Plucker
      • pluker
      • restore
      • rss
      • sony
      • students
      • surf
      • windows
      • wxcmdlineparser

      90% of the search queries by Google users are directly relevant. bing.com is just throwing random garbage around, it seems.

  3. Re:Bing l10n.. by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Re:The reason by Tubal-Cain · · 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".