COMMENTS
Wow, amazing. I guess spending $100M on adds (traditional marketing) doesn't really change behavior. What does BING have to do to gain share?
My site doesn't even show up in Bing, despite being in the 1st page of results for several relevant terms in Google. I'd love to get some traffic from Bing, but w/o any love from them I find them pretty much worthless.
Great stuff, Michelle.
If I had to go to a debate and choose between this data and Comscore's, I'd go with Comscore's.
And comscore has been saying that Bing is gaining on a month over month basis. Some people are guessing that it is because of their cash back/shopping engine.
However, the HubSpot data is very interesting and probably deserves a little more exploration.
Are b2b sites or SMB sites more likely to get traffic from google vs bing vs yahoo?
Is there something about the HubSpot blogging or content management system that is better optimized for Google? (I don't think so, but just asking the q.)
It'd be great if we could grab data from all of our customers and not just 40. I wonder if it's statistically different for the whoel group?
Nice work, Michelle. Look forward to more of these data driven posts.
Michelle
The new "Bing" was released at the beginning of June this year, so I think its a still a little to early to judge if Bing will make a difference.
We've been brainwashed into thinking that only google can provide the most accurate up to date info out there and in most cases that's right.
But I hope that changes and we have a real contender in "search", especially in the adwords arena.
We need Bing to do well and BING needs to get its message out there. That they are able to provide an alternative to google.
But I think its going to take some time and a great deal of effort.
In the long term if Bing does succeed, possibly by lowering its adwords to a bargain basement price, the advertisers will find an alternative google adwords which is becoming an extremely expensive medium
Excellent article Michelle, I had been wondering about this myself. It will be interesting to see the results in another four months.
I do not think you can ignore Bing. Of the 3 Bing is the newest and it is growing slightly weekly/monthly. If you are getting 10% of traffic from bing, then spend 10% of your time there.
Bing is 3rd on our list, but it is 1 in bringing new visitors to the sites.
Google is still the search giant, but dominate the smaller engines while everyone else is ignoring it.
Some important things to consider when evaluating search engine market share:
1) Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask serve very different demographic groups. In general, different demographics use the Internet differently.
2) Bing and Google look for different things when evaluating how a website should be ranked. I'm currently working with some data that should illustrate this point.
3) SEOs have spent the last 5-6 years focusing exclusively on the factors that Google considers important. Bing is still somewhat of a black box.
4) Data collected from panels (i.e. comScore) is quite different from a random sample; which is technically required to utilize inferential statistics.
5) Even assuming a random sample (n = 1,000,000), with 95% confidence, our margin of error = 0.1%. On the surface this appears to be small, but 0.1% of 220,000,000 American Internet users is +/- 220,000 unique visitors.
So what's the
marketing takeaway? Don't rely on one tool to predict website traffic. There are at least half a dozen free tools out there that give estimates. Use all of them in tandem to build a "picture" of the situation.
Practical Application:
Estimates of Google to Bing ratio in August & September (Google unique visitors/Bing Unique Visitors)
Quantcast (US): 3.4
Compete (US): 2.9
Alexa (Global): 10.6
Different estimates of Google to Bing ratio in August (Google Search Share/Bing Search Share)
comScore Search Share (US): 7.0
Compete Search Share (US): 8.5
Nielsen Search Share (US): 6.0
Hitwise Search Share (US): Unavailable
We started to use Bing and thought it was the next wave. When it came down to our total click stream it was just not up to par. Users determin what is altimately accepted and bing was not accepted similar to the big XP vs. Vista debate. There are just too many bugs in Bing to be successsful at this stage of the game.
For the same timeframe as you, our B2B site had Google 92%, Yahoo 5%, Bing 3%, AOL less than 1%, Ask less than 1%.
Google and Bing bring us the same % of new visitors. For some reason, Yahoo brings us many more new visitors but they spend less time on the site compared to Google or Bing (both about equal).
Compared to Jun-Aug, in the last 30 days Bing did gain. From 3% to 4% of search traffic. Going up, but very slowly! At this rate, I will be long retired before Bing has any relevance to my search traffic :-)
Interesting post Michelle, I think that with the plans and changes that are taking place in the arena it will be interesting to see if there is a shift in the next 6 months or so.
Bing still has a way to go but it seems like they are gaining market share little by little.