Bing and Google Search Engine Tug of War

It has been almost a month since the release of Microsoft’s Bing. After all the hype of the massive amount of money spent on their marketing campaigns, perhaps its time to look into what other winning factors Bing has to offer in comparison to their rival competitor Google, especially for advertisers and not forgetting agencies like us.

According to a research using eye tracking technology by User Centric, Bing’s position for sponsored links tend to attract greater attention span (42% of participants per search) from users as compared to Google’s (25% of participants per search). This sounds like good news for Bing and for advertisers looking for alternative platform besides Google for a start.

Remember the related searches results that I’ve mentioned in the previous post? Well, it definitely grasped more attention as well with better visibility, showing at the left side on the page. It was a hands down win for this one, with 31% of users per search for Bing and only 5% for Google (obviously, as the related results are shown at the bottom of the organic search results).

From the below heatmaps, Bing had better gaze duration for the ads shown on the right of the page.

While findings from the above research might suggest Bing’s improvements in navigation experience is seeing results, debates across some reports doubt the accuracy of this experiment with the sample size that seems too small to determine conclusive results.

Apart from the above research finding, Efficient Frontier Inc also reported that clicks for paid ads in Bing went up by 8.1% within a week of its launch. Now, if the trend continues, Bing could expect advertisers to be channeling more budget over (From Yahoo?) in coming months. This is good news for Bing if they can maintain this momentum in the long run, and who knows overtaking Yahoo! to take the 2nd placing  in this search engine race.

Advertisers should be able to notice that gradual updates efforts have been done to adCenter as well to complement with Bing new outlook.

All is still too early to be said and confirmed since afterall, findings from the above sources were done in early stages and this IS still a buzz moment for Bing’s launch. For now, time seems to be the best factor to decide both Bing’s and Google’s efforts in this pull tug of war.