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

[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

[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

[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

[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...

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

[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?

[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.

Well,

[theorem4]

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

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.

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.