Does Bing’s 30% Market Share Really Matter?

Earlier this month, Experian Hitwise reported that Bing-powered search engines – that is, Yahoo! and Bing – together accounted for more than 30% of all U.S. searches in April 2012, up from a 26.9% share a year ago. The same week, comScore announced a combined share of 25.9% for the two engines in April – actually a decline from a 26.5% share in April 2011.

What’s a search marketer to make from this panel data? Should you be focusing more of your efforts on Yahoo! and Bing? Is Google in decline?

A good first step is to look at your actual site data. What is your current share from each search engine, and how has it changed since last year? Since your paid search spend largely determines the traffic you receive from that effort, just look at your natural search data. Of course your natural search visibility can also change quite a bit year-over-year, but if so, hopefully it does in all engines.

I pulled this data for 12 enterprise retail, travel, services, and technology sites with millions of combined natural search visits in April, and their Bing-powered search visits in April 2012 with the change from a year earlier are:

As you can see, these 12 sites have Bing-powered natural search shares of anywhere from 4.5% to 35.7% last month, and also big differences in whether Bing and Yahoo! have grown or declined in share over the past year.

Three takeaways of mine from this data:

1. There isn’t one right answer here. Any of these sites could be considered successful in their search presence. They sell different types of products or offer services to different types of people who may use different engines. For example, the two sites at the Bing-heavy end of the table above cater largely to an older audience, while the technology site at the top favors a very tech-savvy crowd. Depending on what your site’s goals are, you may naturally attract attention from a unique portion of the overall online audience.
2. Still pay attention to Yahoo! and Bing separately too. For most sites, if the Bing-powered share rose or fell at all, both Yahoo! and Bing contributed to that in sync. For the Services site above with a 22% Bing-powered share, though, it’s 0.1 point change since 2011 was because Yahoo! was down 2.7% and Bing was up 2.8%. So the story isn’t always about Bing-powered engines stealing share from Google, or vice versa.
3. Google is still a clear #no. 1 – and might be growing. For 8 of the 12 sites above, the Bing-powered share actually declined year-over-year. For those 8 sites, Google’s share grew an average of 3.1% over last April. If you have opportunities to grow your visibility in Google, focusing on that could yield quite a bit more traffic than Bing and Yahoo! might drive.

It’s clear that while panel data can help inform some macro search trends, its usefulness at your brand’s size in your industry has its limitations. The sites above have a consistent, growing natural search presence across all 3 major engines, but do you?

At iCrossing, we’re believers in “connectedness.” One aspect of being a connected brand is visibility – are you visible where your potential customers are searching, when they are searching?

Jon Maxson is a director of natural search at iCrossing

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