A Deeper Look at Bing's Performance in June
With the release of our June search data to clients today, I have gotten many media questions focused on the Bing results since its launch in early June. With one full month of metrics available, we can now shed more light on its performance, which can be summarized as follows: It generated significant trial, was successful at increasing Microsoft’s share of search page results, and, to a lesser degree, Microsoft’s share of search sessions and search queries. Here is the comparison of June metrics compared to May:
Source: Comscore qSearch | Microsoft Search Results | |||
| May-09 | Jun-09 | Point Difference | Pct Difference |
Searcher Penetration | 36.1% | 41.4% | 5.3% | 14.7% |
Share Of Search Result Pages | 8.8% | 10.5% | 5.3% | 19.0% |
Share Of Search Queries | 8.0% | 8.4% | 1.7% | 4.5% |
Share of Search Sessions | 10.2% | 11.1% | 0.9% | 8.9% |
Searches Per Repeat Search Session | 2.33 | 2.18 | (0.15) | -6.3% |
There was a significant increase of 14.7% in penetration (shown above), driven by new trial which continued to build throughout the month. However, it is important to understand how much of this incremental trial resulted in repeat business. To answer this question, we looked at users who came back for at least another day after their first day of trial during the month of June. We found that 53% of incremental trial users repeated during the month of June. A more important repeat metric is what percent of trial users come back within a 30-day period, which will be available when Comscore’s July data are released. Bearing in mind that marketing campaigns are never able to convert all trial users to repeat users, the July data will give us a much clearer understanding of repeat usage.
Despite the strong trial and respectable repeat rate, Microsoft’s share of queries increased by only 4.5% in June. Why? One reason is that while Bing has built a larger base of repeat searchers, it only benefited from their queries after their first trial. And since many of the new trial users came in throughout June, Bing’s share benefited from only a portion of monthly activity from trial users. One would expect the queries from those users to be higher in July, with a full month of usage. Another contributing factor is that, while the share of search sessions increased by 8.9%, repeat users are now conducting fewer search queries per session (down from 2.33 to 2.18). While this adversely affects query share, it may be a reflection of a better search user experience with Bing compared to Live. This would be the case if users were able to get to their ultimate result faster, with fewer queries in a session. We will only know for sure once the dust settles after this initial trial activity.
Bottom line, Bing has had an initial positive impact on Microsoft’s search position. However, one thing is clear: Closing the gap with its competitors won’t happen overnight. Marketing will certainly help generate more trial, but ultimately the product’s biggest opportunity is to capture a higher share of usage among the 41%+ of searchers that are now using Microsoft but only for a portion of their monthly searches. This will ultimately depend on improved user experience, particularly relative to competitors.
Not surprisingly, it all comes back to sustained product performance. Only time will tell if the search experience provided by Bing is compelling enough to increase adoption and change searcher behavior over the long term.