About Hitwise

Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.

Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

Analyst Weblog

« Wolfram Alpha and Bing initial Asia Pacific stats | Digging Ads »

Australia goes Bing

June 18, 2009

Last week I posted some initial stats around the launch of search engine challengers Wolfram Alpha and Bing. Today I am going to dig a little deeper into Bing’s launch in the Australian market. .

The chart below illustrates the movements in share of visits for key search engines excluding Google on a daily basis over the past month. Google continues to be the dominant search engine in Australia with the five Google search properties featuring in the top 10 being responsible for 87.1% of all visits to the category.

Since peaking on 3 June 2009 with 5.13% share of all visits to the Search Engine category, the share of visits to Bing declined - an expected trend after the initial spikes driven by curiosity and media coverage. Considering the ‘soft launch’ of Bing in Australia with no discernable marketing activity, the future still holds opportunity to access new audiences as features are added locally and marketing activity is implemented.

So what are people searching for on Bing?

The branded search term trends that we have seen over past years are also highlighted in Bing’s early results. Of the top 100 search terms for the four weeks ending 13 June 2009 (containing the first two weeks of search activity) 94% are brand related, comparatively Google Australia has 7 generic search terms in the top 100 search terms (93% brand related).

The table below illustrates the similarity between the top 10 search terms on Bing and Google Australia for the four weeks ending 13 June 2009.. The top 100 search terms account for 12.2% share of all search volume on Bing and 6.6% of Google Australia.

Bing’s top generic search term is ‘swine flu’ at number 38 with 0.8% share of searches, however the top generic term on Google Australia is ‘tv guide’ ranked at 28 with a 0.6% share of searches. The term ‘swine flu’ ranks at 71 on Google Australia with a share of 0.3% of searches.

The table below lists the top industries receiving traffic from Bing in Australia during the week ending 13 June 2009. The pattern between Bing’s downstream traffic and Google Australia’s is very similar.

Computers and Internet; Business and Finance; Entertainment; Shopping and Classifieds; and News and Media websites are receiving similar percentages of downstream traffic from both search engines. The largest difference is the volume of traffic from Bing to other search engines indicates that visitors have been sampling Bing and then returning to their default search engine. Google Australia was the top search engine to receive downstream traffic from Bing in week ending 13 June 2009 and the most searched for term since Bing was commissioned on 28 May 2009.

ninemsn properties (including Windows Live Mail, ninemsn News and ninemsn) appear in the Top 10 downstream traffic from Bing. However it seems the soft launch approach has put more dependence upon the ninemsn properties to generate discovery of Bing with ninemsn sites in the top 10 sites upstream delivering 53.7% of Bing’s visitors during week ending 13 June 2009.

We’ll continue to follow the search market, so follow us on Twitter to stay up to date. Over the coming days we’ll post similar analysis for New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore