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?"

Comments

What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Who would have thought that people who would switch to an inferior search engine based on an aggressive marketing campaign would be more susceptible to advertising?

Re:What a surprise

[iluvcapra]

The story is pretty clear that, even with bing's higher click-thru rate, The Google still gets your ad about 13 times as many impressions. Though, not knowing the pricing structures both companies use for ads, I could not tell you the proper return on advertising for both services.

(Note also that, after the initial bump, Bing has once again fallen behind Yahoo.)

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of Bing COULD be boosted by IE 8 choosing that by default. How many users install software defaults?

As for clicking on ads, there are lots of potential reasons, including the ones mentioned here. But of course, since it's a "decision engine" people are more likely to follow that decision. ;-)

Re:What a surprise

[Fnkmaster]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

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"?

Re:What a surprise

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

The use of Bing COULD be boosted by IE 8 choosing that by default. How many users install software defaults?

As for clicking on ads, there are lots of potential reasons, including the ones mentioned here. But of course, since it's a "decision engine" people are more likely to follow that decision. ;-)

I would be very surprised if there were not a strong correlation between users who don't customize their settings and users who more frequently respond to advertising the way that the advertisers want them to.

That's because defaults are intended to be applied to millions of users and therefore cannot be ideal for all users or even very many of them. At least, I'll say that the number of people who use all-default settings is far greater than the number of users for whom this is ideal. The greater the number of options which can be customized, the more true this is. Someone who has an "ideal" in mind for how their setup should be and is willing to undergo at least some minor effort to arrange it is more likely to be a more independent thinker, reducing the susceptibility to external suggestion such as advertising.

Re:What a surprise

[binarylarry]

You should just be thankful bing didn't return:

"You searched for "SNES Game" - Don't you really mean "Xbox 360 Games"?"

Re:What a surprise

[Anonymous Coward]

http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1315571&cid=28828855

Re:What a surprise

[mysidia]

There's a pandemic of Microsoft Hating syndrome, as discovered by Linus Torvalds.

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

Something just bothers me about the "decision engine" thing. I'd like to think people are smart enough to make their own decisions and not follow whatever their search engine tells them to do, but for some reason I doubt that is the case. I think the major reason people click on more adds when using Bing is that those of us who Google already have some idea of what we are looking for, those of us who use Bing are looking for someone or something to make those choices for us. As for me, even if Bing was the best search engine ever invented, it gives me a bloody headache to look at it.

Re:What a surprise

[morghanphoenix]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[stuboogie]

I conducted the same search on Google and Bing and you are correct that Google clearly returns the FEMA National Level Exercise results first. While Bing did not return reference to FEMA as the first result.

However, what if someone used that same search string to find info about:

New Living Expo
National Latin Exam
Nursing Licensing Examination

Bing returned links to those and a few other minor uses of the acronym on the first page. Google, however, only returned results for the Nursing Licensing Examination.
So, I guess you declared Google the clear winner because somehow they magically knew you wanted info about FEMA and not one of the other uses of that acronym. Someone searching for the National Latin Exam may disagree with you since it doesn't show up on Google until half way down the third page.

While I like the fact that Bing returns more relevant options initially, what would be nice is if Bing then allowed you to select the result that most represents the topic you are actually looking for and then narrow the results to only include those.

Of course, you could just be more specific with your search terms instead of relying on a computer to interpret the true meaning of an acronym you used.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

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.

I don't think those users are merely dumb. A truly dumb person can't help it, and so I wouldn't fault them for that any more than I would blame a paraplegic for being unable to walk. What I do blame those "dumb users" for is something I call willful helplessness. That's when the information is out there, freely available, the person in question is literate and has 'Net access, and refuses to educate themselves even for simple configuration issues. It wouldn't be so bad except that these same people often complain that they don't get the results they want, and/or they think it's a terribly unreasonable thing to suggest that they can help themselves, almost like it's some kind of insult. Usually that's followed by something like "I'm not a computer expert" as though changing basic settings makes one an "expert."

Many such users are on Windows. There could probably be debates about whether that's because Windows inherently suits them or if it's merely because that's what the computer came with and this kind of user is quite unlikely to evaluate other options since that would require the learning that they so resent. The easiest way to identify such folks is that they can use the same machine for years and never know much more about it than when they started. That's what amazes me. It seems like it would take a lot more work to make sure you don't pick up some knowledge here and there that would accumulate over the years, but I suppose you could say that they are true to their passive mentality.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

Something just bothers me about the "decision engine" thing. I'd like to think people are smart enough to make their own decisions and not follow whatever their search engine tells them to do, but for some reason I doubt that is the case. I think the major reason people click on more adds when using Bing is that those of us who Google already have some idea of what we are looking for, those of us who use Bing are looking for someone or something to make those choices for us. As for me, even if Bing was the best search engine ever invented, it gives me a bloody headache to look at it.

Yeah, I don't like it either and it's easy to deconstruct. When you don't really value and cherish freedom, you necessarily also don't value relative independence and self-sufficiency. When you don't have such firm and truly worthy principles, then you must resort to viewing everything in terms of whether or not it is immediately convenient. That means you view any independent problem-solving or decision-making as a burden or a price of admission for getting what you want, instead of viewing it as a way to expand your knowledge or to sharpen your skills. So someone comes along and offers to do some thinking and decision-making for you and then you can't help but view that as very nice of them. It's a naivete that might be cute if so many (so-called) adults didn't subscribe to it.

That's really just the tip of the iceberg. Bing is a rather benign effect of this horrible mentality. The ever-increasing size and power of government is a malign effect that goes with it because these are helpless people who need to be taken care of. So is the lack of independent realization in the average person; that is, the absence of ideas that someone else didn't spent a lot of money to put there. I do not exaggerate when I say that this is unsustainable and a nation which is based on this idea is well on its way to collapsing. Bing's "selling points" and why anyone would find them desirable are just symptoms of much deeper phenomena. Really, Microsoft is just giving those people what they want and probably doesn't care (or even know) about why they want it or whether it's good for them to have.

Re:What a surprise

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[thetoadwarrior]

http://effortlesscomputing.co.uk/tag/bing/

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

There's a pandemic of Microsoft Hating syndrome, as discovered by Linus Torvalds.

"Syndrome" sounds like a disease. When you really do engage in anticompetitive, manipulative, underhanded practices, have been convicted in multiple nations of doing so in an illegal fashion, have (in my opinion) resorted to bribery to compromise independent standards bodies, have made Webmasters everywhere bear additional costs because you refuse to fully adhere to open standards, and have abused the meaning of "updates to the OS" to install phone-home software (WGA), perhaps it's understandable that many people won't like you? Just maybe that's not a "syndrome" but a predictable outcome?

Mr. Torvalds made a case for why it is sometimes expedient to work with a company that is important in its industry. He has not made the case that their tactics should be celebrated or that it's unreasonable to dislike them. The only way to make that case is to prove that everyone should enjoy the ill effects of abusive practices and that any and all pushback against them is wrong and unfounded. That would not be the argument of a sane person.

Re:What a surprise

[Kalriath]

So it couldn't possibly be because on a Microsoft search engine, the terms people search for are more Microsoft-centric, thereby resulting in a biased pool of suggestions?

It couldn't possibly be because most people with a genuine interest in Linux are Microsoft-hating sheep who wouldn't dare go near a Microsoft search engine, resulting in a dearth of Linux-but-not-Microsoft related search terms?

Please.

Re:What a surprise

[countertrolling]

...willful helplessness...

I think the "correct" term is learned helplessness, and it is not entirely a matter of free will as much as it is of conditioning. And it really shows itself in our dealings with authority and why more people don't rebel against it.

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[michaelhood]

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.

Re:What a surprise

[TheRaven64]

Wait, you're seriously suggesting the fact that you can hand-edit the binary to change a hard-coded constant string (and have it reset every time you update the binary) counts as the ability to change it? By that token, I can run Linux executables on OS X; I just need to edit the kernel binary to add system call handlers for all of the Linux system calls...

Re:What a surprise

[causality]

I would venture to say that most humans are born curious, but then have it beaten out of them, both figuratively through the demands of societal conformity(specifically through the education system, church, etc.), and literally by the parents. It all happens at a very early age usually beyond conscious memory of the adult. Either way, it's usually our environment that kills the urge. Genetics plays a comparatively small part.

This is absolutely the truth! Any thorough investigation into the matter will convince you that this has been both deliberate and systematically executed, for the purpose of creating a society of people who are easier to control because they do not have strong minds that are willing to question. The public schools are essential to this effort and it could not have been so successful without them.

Albert Einstein once said "it's a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."

Also, you are not really venturing with that one. You are exercising the natural intuitive brightness and discernment that is your birthright as a human being. I say this because you may not be aware of how profound your insight actually is or of the real means by which you understood it. Let's say it was more direct than ordinary deductive processes. It only feels like a venture because people who do not possess that brightness may ask you to prove it to them logically or mathematically which is quite difficult compared to being able to see it on your own and know that it is the truth. The challenge is learning to trust that intuition.

It's a delight for me whenever I see an example of this. It makes me believe that there is still some hope, that maybe this unsustainable society doesn't need to collapse under the weight of its own excesses, or that if it does that it will be replaced by something much better. You won't see them promoted in the media because the media is heavily invested in the status quo, but I am encountering more and more people who have real understanding to some degree or another.

If I may, I'd like to recommend something to you. Another man has explored the same realization you have shared here, and for the subject of public schools he is quite exceptional because he was a schoolteacher for decades who was very good at what he did. He had to resign after he realized the damage that was being done in the name of education. His name is John Taylor Gatto. I'd highly recommend to you his essay and also his free online book. There is no better reference for this subject anywhere. Both are enlightening reads that I think you will truly enjoy.

Re:What a surprise

[countertrolling]

then why is it that since the beginning of the history of homo sapiens we have been a deeply religious/theistic species?

Well, considering that written history hardly goes 20,000 years back, that really doesn't mean much, does it? The fact that it was written might indicate a system of formal education already existed. And within the realm of psychology(funny that you brought that up, because it was on my mind), especially social(mass) psychology, the 1930s were exciting times, and they got a pretty good handle on the nature of religion, authoritarianism, and natural phobias. And I would bet that even 6,000 years ago they knew what they were doing with the tools they had. In those "olden" days people were very inquisitive, and fearful of the things they didn't understand, and the people who figured things out had the opportunity to teach and guide them, but instead they took advantage of the situation and enslaved them by exploiting those fears and killing off any critical thought. Tin hats? Don't think so. Just people doing "like they do on the Discovery Channel".

Re:What a surprise

[ErroneousBee]

That could be it. If you type "bash c" into bing, it suggests the only practical programming a windows fan is likely to understand.

Sort of a double edged sword...

[Utopia Tree]

to be able to say our users are sheep

The reason

[Jugalator]

It's because users of Microsoft services are more stupid than the general population. There, I said it!

Re:The reason

[Tubal-Cain]

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".

Something fishy about Bing

[Darth_brooks]

I make a habit out of checking out the awstats for our domain, and noticed something kinda odd. Bing very quickly became our top referring site. This might just be awstats not treating bing as a search engine (and categorizing hits from them accordingly) or it could be Bing doing something fishy.

Anyone else see something like this?

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[larry bagina]

maybe Bing's previews cause the user to hit your site without leaving the bing page.

Re:Something fishy about Bing

[PaintyThePirate]

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.

Umm... cash back anyone?

[NitroWolf]

Umm? I don't suppose this statistic is anyway affected by the fact that maybe they (Microsoft) give UP TO 35 FREAKING % cashback on items?

I mean... of course you're going to get a higher click through rate when you're offering a 35% discount for clicking through on Bing vs clicking through on Google.

I've gotten close to $1000 back for using Live search aka Bing. Of course I check there first... if I find an ad with the Microsoft cashback option, you better believe I snap it up. Then I go back to Google to do my real searching.

This statistic is completely meaningless since it's blatantly obvious that people are going to use a service that GIVES THEM MONEY vs a service that is just plain free. Gee, imagine that.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[colganc]

If cashback is something they keep around for two years or more I consider it as part of the search engine. At two years or more it must be part of their business model.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[ChronoFish]

Who said you can't beat free?

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[Etherized]

I hear you. I'll often find products using google or deal sites, then go through bing just for the cash back - it would be really silly if that sort of usage counted as a bing success story.

TFA doesn't specify whether this sort of usage is included in the comparison.

Re:Umm... cash back anyone?

[Skreems]

Cashback isn't going anywhere. It's a permanent feature. The goal, of course, is that you don't go back to Google when they don't offer up a carrot, because you've found that the whole thing is worth using. As long as they keep paying out on Cashback, they'll have a set of people ready and waiting to notice when they actually fix the product as a whole. Not that I think that will happen anytime soon.

Well,

[theorem4]

Would that click through rate include the ads for Cashback? If so, I might consider the results skewed.

S.O.P.

[meerling]

With anything that has been marketed/hyped, never rely on the initial numbers.
Ignore the first month of a search engine, and the first week of a new movie.
After the curious and easily manipulated are out of the way, you can get a real result.

Re:Obvious

[Sporkinum]

Combination of no adblockers on the default IE with the default Bing search page on most computers. Bing cashback, and the obfuscation of ads mixed in with real results. I'd say they are doing a good job of covering their bases.

Bing seems to be used by idiots

[oneandoneis2]

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..

Re:Bing seems to be used by idiots

[hacker]

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.

Bing l10n..

[Seth Kriticos]

I'm in a Germany and my browser language preference is set to English (because I prefer it).

Now most sites (including Google) manage to get my geo-location and annoy me with a German start page (ignoring my language preferences). (At least I could set my prefs. at google, but its bothering to do this for every site I visit).

Now visiting Bing gave me something unusual: a hybrid l10n. The controls were partly in English and the search suggestions (random stuff at the button of the screen) came in German. Searching for something gave only German results.

And there I thought it couldn't get worse than it is already.. but this irks the hell out of me.

ps. And the scaling of mostly everything was messed up too.. Way to go if you want to convince technical folks, Microsoft..

Re:Bing l10n..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Slimy Submission Text

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the type of story summary used here that shows early signs of the disease Linus was talking about. What kind of lowlife asshole uses a phrase like:

reaped the low hanging fruit of those particularly persuaded by advertising

It's advertising, dickhead. If people like what is being advertised they will click the link, watch the commercial, and buy the product. Why is someone who investigates an advertisement deemed less intelligent? Does not fast forwarding through a commercial make you a moron? Does leafing through the Sunday morning circular make you a fool? Ohh, that's right, they are using a Microsoft service. Tee hee. So witty, so funny.

I used to really like Slashdot, but the quality of the submissions is really taking an ugly tone. Who do we blame? The people writing the submission? Or the person who allows it to be post. This isn't even a Kdawson story so we can't blame him. Slashdot doesn't seem to have any commitment to making sure summaries are well written and free from juvenile bias.

TFA has a blatantly skewed perspective

[liquiddark]

The susceptibility of users is one possibility, of course, but so are
1) better product (see the comments regarding Cashback ads)
2) better placement
3) better advertising clients (ever seen an interesting google ad but hesitated to click because of the shady domain?)

Re:The ads are not presented as ads

[dotwhynot]

Can someone tell me how this higher click-through is some sort of a discovery? Bing integrates the ads into the search results. That is why it is smarter to use google - at least with google you can opt not to click on the ad.

Show me where the ad is. What? You can't tell? Me either - so don't use Bing.

What are you talking about? The ads and distinction made (background colour, "sponsored links", top and right) is damn near identical to similar search on Google. Are you talking about the "shop for" extra feature? That is not ads, but a (very useful) integrated shopping search result (similar to going to Google Product Search). Having additional levels of search functionality integrated in the answers like this for some verticals (shopping, travel, etc.) is one of the ways Bing try to differentiate from Google (together with the left column drill-down functionality, which I'm starting to like more and more after trying it).

It's all Live Cashback bribery

[Junior J. Junior III]

If you sign up for Microsoft Live Cashback, you can use Bing search to get discounts on stuff you buy.

In effect, Microsoft is bribing the general public to use their search engine. This is not designed to be profitable or sustainable. Of course, I'm sure Microsoft doesn't care, as long as it hurts Google's biggest revenue stream.

I use Bing to "search" for something that I already know I want to buy, and then click on the Cashback link to get anywhere from 2-30% off on my purchase.

This isn't really "searching" the internet. It's jumping through hoops to get a discount. I'd buy the thing anyway whether it was advertised or not, whether I'd get a discount or not. Since the discount's available, I take advantage of it.

Of course, advertisers don't actually care about people searching the internet the real way. They care about people buying stuff from them. If they believe that Bing users are more likely to buy than Google users, they'll probably put a lot of advertising money up at Bing. I actually block advertising in both search results, but I turn it off temporarily if I want to make a Cashback purchase.

Aside from a few accidental uses, and a few test searches to see how the results compared with I *never* use Bing when searching for any kind of information if I'm just doing a general web search, I use google's search engine. I don't know that Bing search results are any better or worse than Google's, but I'm comfortable using Google and I know that I'll usually find what I'm looking for pretty easily once I find the right query terms to enter.

Great news for me

[spywhere]

One of my (newest) customers had a problem with IE opening a .aspx file from his bank's Web site.

Vista offered to look for a program on the Web... it used Bing to seek a solution... and the "sponsored link" he clecked was malware.

Bottom line: Bing gave me a $90 cleanup job.

Is this data from Chitika audited?

[Helldesk Hound]

This data appears to be provided from one business only - Chitika, presumably from data that they gathered from their advertizing.

Has it been audited with a view to confirming that the click throughs are indeed actually happening?

Has that data been compared with data from all the many other advertizing businesses that spam websites via Search Engines?

To what extent is Chitika's advertizing only based on Microsoft Bing and not on the other search engines? :o)

It's the Bing Cash--AKA the MONEY!

[PatSand]

Folks-

Let's apply Occam's Razor here: They offer Bing Cash on selected web sites (especially eBay) that you click though to and buy from when you have signed up for Bing Cash (free, as in beer).

I'm not scared of using Bing and Bing Cash to get 2-8% back on my purchases (even if it takes up to 60 days). I use my other browsers to find out what I want to buy (amongst other things) and use Bing with Bing Cash to buy the item, if possible, and get some money back.

I don't use Bing for general searching or research, just when I am looking to buy something.

I guess this is where their big advertising budget is going towards. My wallet, for a change.

So I'm not surprised that their click-thru rate is higher, and probably their click-n-buy rate; but this will last as long as they have the Bing Cash program. Now if they looked at how much research was being done, I bet that is very low.