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Bing: Will It Live Up To The Hype?

Microsoft’s introduction of Bing has finally thrown a much needed monkey wrench into the Google-dominated search engine market. It has been a month since the launch of Bing and there are already speculations, statistics, and forecasts predicting the future of this buzz-worthy decision engine.

As defined by Microsoft, Bing is a decision engine, “a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition, or finding a local business.”

Market Impact
Varying predictions and statistics of Bing’s impact on the search engine marketing industry have risen since its launch. In a recent Search Engine Land article, comScore reported that Microsoft Bing’s “searcher penetration” (the percentage of everyone on the web who made it to a particular search engine on a daily basis) experienced a 1.7% gain since the decision engine’s launch. Although Google and Yahoo! also saw an increase in searcher penetration, Bing’s was more noticeable.

While comScore was able to see a gain for Bing, Compete reported no change since the launch. Using “search engine users share” (the percentage of searchers in the United States who visited one or more search services), Bing did show a 3% increase. However, the increase was not at the expense of other services. As Bing increased from 8.8% to 11.8% on the date of launch, Google, Yahoo! and Ask all remained within 1% of their regular share. Compete’s statistics reflect that although users are taking the time to visit Bing and even search on it, they are not giving up their regular search habits just yet. Compete’s study shows that although there has been an influx of visitors to Bing, there has not been a gain in search share since its launch.

The general consensus on the current impact of Bing seems to be that yes, there is an increase in interest for the decision engine and the amount of visitors. However, users have not left their habitual searching habits in the dirt. Hitwise ranked Bing as the fourth most popular search engine -- at a glance, this seems like a respectable result but after a bit of research it was discovered that Microsoft’s Live Search (the search engine that Bing replaced) was also amongst the most popular sites.

Bing and SEM
According to Bing, they have redesigned SERPs in a way that is a major step forward in how users will think of and use search. The results are now displayed in categories which return more relevant content. Bing goes on to explain that “webmasters might initially be concerned that the shortened primary organic listing in the new Bing SERP might render their SEO efforts as less effective.” However, the new SERP makes competing for broad terms easier since more categories are shown automatically which increases the number of results on the page and generates more relevant content.

Bing claims that click through rates for items in their categorized results are higher than results in the normal organic listings. The new multi-threaded SERP design renders more pages that are closely associated with the primary keywords being searched. For example, when searching “Matthew McConaughey” on Bing, results will surface in categories such as news, biography, fan club, posters, quotes, etc. The likelihood that Bing will surface a user’s specific website appears to be heavily based on domain age and anchor text as researched by SEOwizz.net. As explained in the Bing New Features for Webmasters white paper, “Bing removes duplicate results from the categorized results list, which allows other, lower ranked pages to be shown in the categorized results on its SERP.” The way in which sites are rendered on Bing is different than the traditional on page factors and total number of links used by Google.  

On Bing’s online shopping page, a query is created by Bing based on what product and category users click on. As a result, MSN adCenter PPC advertisements appear even though the user never searched for that specific phrase. From the standpoint of an advertiser, this method almost guarantees an increase in impressions because users do not have to query to see their advertisement. This method poses a question of good vs. bad. A user may also be less likely to convert since they are not actively searching for the product/service. The advertiser could then experience an increase in traffic while receiving lower quality visitors. The different method that Bing uses is what is causing a mix in results across the market.

Current Experiences
Apogee Results’s firsthand experience with Bing rendered mixed results for three of our clients. All three clients experienced an increase in click through rates (May vs. June) since the switch to Bing from Live Search. One client experienced a tremendous increase in impressions, sales, revenue, ROAS, and conversion rates; another client experienced a significant decline in impressions, sales, revenue, ROAS, and conversion rate; and the third client’s results remained relatively stable.

It appears as though the lack of time has left us with extremely mixed results from Bing. Efficient Frontier has reported a 19.8% lift in impressions for Bing. Our client results have shown that impressions have varied across the board since the launch of Bing. Although there seems to be a general assumption of how Bing is performing, our results do not seem to match the current news reports in their entirety.  Again, we believe the lack of time is a major factor here.

We have gained some key insights as to the functionality of Bing from an SEM standpoint. Bing has a simplified Webmaster Center where URL’s can be submitted to be crawled and local business listings can be achieved. The new ease of use is an improvement from the previous MSN Live interface and allows a business to be added in the local listings quite simply. In terms of searching, Bing forces long-tail searches for overly broad keywords by providing both the already familiar “related searches,” as well as recommending a pre-set list of the deeper categories of searches, all above the fold on the left side of the page. Additionally, Bing has greatly improved “instant answers,” which could mean decreased click through rates when a user is browsing for a specific answer. Aside from these differences, the process of optimizing for Bing appears to be essentially the same as Google’s, at least for the time being. 

Summation
Bing will land on its feet post-hype. However, its chances of overthrowing Google in terms of market share are unlikely. It seems as though the current issue with the Bing evaluations is that it is not being evaluated against Live Search, but rather against Google. In reality, Bing does not have to overthrow Google to be successful; it can succeed by taking a different approach. I believe that Bing will gain market share at the expense of search engines that make up smaller pieces of the search engine pie such as Ask.com and Yahoo!

In order to truly see the performance of Bing we are going to have to wait. The current buzz being generated both from anticipation and the massive advertising push behind Microsoft’s new service could be giving us abnormal statistics. It is not until Bing settles in as a regular decision engine that we will be able to gauge its success. Bing will have a chance to show true statistics, but as CEO Steve Ballmer explains, “[Microsoft] we are going to have to be tenacious and keep up the pace of innovation over a long period of time" in order to succeed.

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