Jessica Hill Jessica Hill

June 23, 2009

Search Engine Market Share: Will Bing Take Over the World?

There has been a lot of buzz around Bing possibly gaining market share in the search engine arena. It is still a little early to tell how it will shake out, especially while Microsoft is blasting out their ad campaigns, but I wanted to take a look at a sample of clients’ websites across various industries to draw some preliminary conclusions.

The table below uses data compiled from GA for the weeks of May 9-15, June 6-12 and June 13-19. The sites bring in a range of monthly visitors and have varying percentages of keywords in the top 10 for each engine listed.

Company A – Average of 295,000 Monthly Visitors
Engine 5/9-15 Share 6/6-12 Share % Change 5/9-6/6 6/13-19 Share % Change 6/6-6/13 % Change 5/9-6/13 % of Keywords in Top 10
Google 81.35% 83.75% 2.95% 81.16% -3.09% -0.23% 97.60%
Yahoo! 10.43% 9.41% -9.78% 9.86% 4.78% -5.47% 66.70%
Live/MSN/Bing 4.82% 3.36% -30.29% 5.42% 61.31% 12.45% 83.30%
Company B – Average of 125,000 Monthly Visitors
Engine 5/9-15 Share 6/6-12 Share % Change 5/9-6/6 6/13-19 Share % Change 6/6-6/13 % Change 5/9-6/13 % of Keywords in Top 10
Google 79.11% 79.24% 0.16% 77.94% -1.64% -1.48% 67.80%
Yahoo! 14.40% 14.66% 1.81% 15.04% 2.59% 4.44% 64.40%
Live/MSN/Bing 5.27% 4.72% -10.44% 5.81% 23.09% 10.25% 60.00%
Company C – Average of 20,000 Monthly Visitors
Engine 5/9-15 Share 6/6-12 Share % Change 5/9-6/6 6/13-19 Share % Change 6/6-6/13 % Change 5/9-6/13 % of Keywords in Top 10
Google 71.91% 78.85% 9.65% 74.37% -5.68% 3.42% 31.50%
Yahoo! 9.32% 10.47% 12.34% 10.00% -4.49% 7.30% 22.20%
Live/MSN/Bing 18.77% 10.67% -43.15% 15.63% 46.49% -16.73% 29.60%

The key number to look at is the percentage change in market share from the week of May 9-15 to the week of June 13-19. This compares a stable period, where searchers were familiar with Live/MSN’s offerings, to the latest week of data for the new engine, Bing.

Google has very minimal changes, both in gaining or losing market share, across all three companies. This indicates that even though searchers are curious about Bing, Google isn’t really seeing many negatives from its introduction. Yahoo’s market share fluctuates among the companies with more gains than losses, demonstrating that Bing hasn’t really taken it’s market share either. Finally Bing/MSN/Live’s market share moves around as well, showing higher peaks and valleys for gains and losses than the other two engines.

Company A sees the most influence from Bing, and a majority of its terms show up on the first page of all three engines. This company is a good example to look at by itself because it has a significant amount of monthly visitors and searchers don’t have to look very far to find a result for Company A. If any market share is transferred, Company A shows it might come from Yahoo.

Although searchers are curious about Bing right now and using it more than MSN/Live was used in previous months, it doesn’t really seem like much has changed as far as market share is concerned, especially for all of the fancy bells and whistles Microsoft is using to lure in searchers. Perhaps Bing will be able to offer a different type of search engine, or decision engine as Joshua Palau coins it, in the future; however, searchers currently still like the simple blue links.

2 COMMENTS

  • Jeff says:
    June 23, 2009 @ 10:07 pm

    We noticed some bing traffic showing up as referred rather than search so be sure to double check for any data being attributed inaccurately as some analytics software still needs updating.

    On another note, I think either your designer or perhaps the developer of this comment popup plugin has their branding in the page title. Might want to clean that up.

    Thanks for sharing the data though!

  • Doug Kirschman says:
    June 30, 2009 @ 9:02 am

    This is yet another site that says that Google won’t be affected. I beg to differ. Here’s why.

    Supposing most of Bing’s gains come at the expense of Yahoo, if only the slightest (1 percent say) come from Google, they lost. It would imply, rightfully so, that Google has reached an apex and has nowhere to go but down.

    I hear a lot of talk about Google not being scared of Bing. I doubt it. I believe they are very smart people. If they are, the would be terriified.

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