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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Initial Bing stats

June 08, 2009

Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was announced by Steve Balmer on May 28 and officially launched on June 3. I’ve held off putting up our initial UK statistics until now for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I couldn’t think of a funny - yet appropriate - headline containing the phrase ‘Bada Bing’. As you can see, I still haven’t achieved that objective, but we have crossed the second barrier: collecting a week’s worth of usage data in order to report on something more than just the expected launch day spike.

The chart below illustrates Bing’s daily market share of the search engine market in the UK compared with Yahoo!, Ask and Microsoft’s other main property, Live Search (but excluding Google UK and US, which continue to maintain the lion’s share). Traffic peaked on June 3, when Bing was the eighth most visited website in the UK (ahead of all BBC properties, but one behind MSN UK) and the third ranked search engine, accounting for 10.8% of the UK market. Since the initial launch hype, traffic to the site has declined. However, one positive sign is that average visit time has increased to eight and a half minutes. This is half of Google UK’s number but only slightly below Yahoo! UK Search, implying that the people are actually spending time on the site and using it rather than just visiting out of curiosity.

So what are people searching for on Bing? As with other engines, the majority of searches are branded. For the 4 weeks ending June 6 (i.e. primarily last week’s search data), the top search term in Bing was ‘facebook’, which accounted for 3.94% of searches on the engine. ‘facebook’ was also the most popular term on Google UK over the same period, but only accounted for 2.17% of searches. Of course, Google remains much more popular that Bing in the UK. Therefore it is perhaps not surprising that individual terms count for a smaller percentage of total searches, given that many more searches are carried out on the search engine. The search distribution data also bears this out: the top 100 individual search terms account for 20.1% of searches on Bing, but only 12.0% on Google UK.

Despite the dominance of branded terms, there are 5 generic terms in Bing’s top 100. The top generic term search for on Bing is ‘music’, which ranks 13th overall and accounts for 0.24% of all searches. Interestingly,’ weather’, the most popular generic term on Google UK, only ranks 55th; but there are more generic terms (7) overall in the search engine’s top 100.

The table below lists the top industries receiving traffic from Bing in the UK last week. As you can see, the pattern is pretty similar to Google UK, with Entertainment, Shopping and Classifieds (i.e. online retail), social networks and Business and Finance (which includes banking, insurance, utilities, etc.) making up the top four downstream industries for both properties. The only major different is in the amount of traffic sent to other search engines. For Bing this number is much higher, highlighting the number of visitors that tried the engine before returning to their usual choice. Google UK was the third most popular website visited after Bing last week, while ‘google’ was actually the second most popular term searched for on the engine.

However, the downstream data also paints a positive picture for Bing, as last week its top downstream site was MSN UK. Looking at the upstream data, it is also clear that Bing relied on other Microsoft properties for most of its traffic: 45.8% came from MSN UK, with a further 16.6% from Windows Live Mail (Hotmail).

Obviously we’ll be following this story as it unfolds, so keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for updates and debate. In particular, I’ll try to post some demographics data later in the week.

Posted by Robin Goad at 09:50 AM | (11) | (2)
In Categories Branding | Email | Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Weather

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Links to weblogs that reference this entry:

• Bing Loses Ground After Fast Rise (News: Everything-e)
  Sorry, Bing fans, but Microsoft's new search engine seems to have stumbled before it even cleared [Read More]
• Bing takes over 10% of UK search traffic (The blog of Rob Margel - Windows Help)
  Well it did for a couple of days before falling back according to the latest hitwise data “Traffic peaked [Read More]

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