Early indicators show that Microsoft’s new decision engine ‘Bing’ is indeed helping Microsoft to establish a better position in the Search Engine Market.
Microsoft Live Search had been losing market share in the last quarter of 2008 and first quarter of 2009, but Bing seems to be changing that situation now.
Reports from Efficient Frontier show that ROI received by advertisers has gone up by 43% for Google, and by 24% for Microsoft Bing, but has dropped by 8% for Yahoo!
This is in spite of the fact that the over all expenditure by advertisers on search marketing has gone down by 21% compared to the same time last year.
The amount that advertisers spent on Bing has gone up by only0.1 percentage points compared to last year, but has gone up by 0.7 percentage points when compared to the first quarter of 2009.
In the second quarter of 2009, Bing received 4.5% of ad spend of the clients of Efficient Frontier, while Yahoo! received 20.5% and Google received 75%. At the same time, Bing had 4.1% of the total clicks while Yahoo! had 24.3% and Google had 71.6%
Bing has been doing especially well in the travel and financial services sectors.
The report by Efficient Frontiers also shows that the amount which its medium spenders (between $50,000 to $2,00,000 per month) are spending on SEM has gone up by 5% in Q2 of 2009, compared to the amount spent at the same time last year, but small advertisers (below $50,000 per month) spent only 59% of what they spent last year, and large advertisers (above $2,00,000 per month) spent 78% of what they spent last year. Over all, the budgets have gone down by 21%.
On the other hand, another SEM company reported that large spenders (over $1 million per year) spent 18.77% more than they did last year, while small spenders (below $1 million per year) spent 25.33% less than they did last year.
comScore reports that Microsoft had 8.4% of market share soon after the launch of Bing in June 2009, compared to 8.02% in May 2009. but that figure is still less than the 9.2% which they had in June 2008. This may be the effect of the recession though.
