Efficient Frontier Insights shares some data that indicates Bing continues to grow significantly. In June, the firm reported that Microsoft experienced a 13% increase in paid click share. Now they say for the first week of August, Bing has lifted click share by 44% since the beginning of June.
“They did particularly well in both the Travel and Finance categories showing an 11% and 22% click share lift in these categories,” says Justin Merickel, VP, Marketing and New Product Development at Efficient Frontier. “Microsoft’s new category focused Bing features may have helped them capture more of the seasonal summer travel searching and the additional query volume related to the stock market recovery. Furthermore, the announcement of the Yahoo!/Microsoft deal may have promoted additional searches on Bing as users check out for themselves the new service.”
“We’ll need to continue to monitor their progress but the current trends are boding well for Microsoft,” says Merickel.
Compete data shows that unique visitors to Bing have pretty much leveled off between June and July. There is slight growth, but nothing too impressive based on this graph:
There’s no question that Bing has been building buzz, and appears to be on the way to becoming much more successful than its predecessor, Live Search. Once Bing takes over Yahoo, that will be increased dramatically as well. As I wrote earlier, however, Bing better have some real real-time search functionality up its sleeve, at least in some capacity, as it appears that Google is headed more in that direction with its new Caffeine update.
