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June 11, 2009
Hitwise Adds to Good News for Bing
We've already seen comScore and StatCounter report an auspicious start for Microsoft's newly launched Bing search engine. Now, Hitwise shares Initial Bing Stats for US and Canada.
According to Heather Dougherty, Hitwise's director of research:
In the US, Bing ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the week ending June 6, 2009.
In Canada, Bing hit the top 10 among all websites during the first week of launch and captured 1% of all Canadian Internet visits last week. Bing also ranked 3rd last week in terms of the market share of visits within the Search Engines category behind Google Canada and Google.
That's quite a hot start, though it remains to be seen how long that traffic level can be sustained. It's driving awareness with its TV ad campaigns, media coverage, and curiosity, but those things won't keep Bing going at these levels for long. Microsoft needs to offer searchers something that exceeds what they can get from their current search engine -- most likely Google -- to make them change their behavior.
The surge in traffic is at least worth a short-term look from advertisers. Melissa Mackey took a look at Bing from an advertiser perspective today in "Can Bing Really Bring It for PPC Advertisers?" She says it's more than just rebranded Live Search, and Microsoft has promised more advertising innovations coming down the line soon.
Posted by Kevin Newcomb on June 11, 2009 11:12 AM
Comments
Marco June 11, 2009 11:31 AM
Surely we should be comparing stats for Bing.com with those for MSN + Live.com to see if there is any real increase, considering as all the above searches now default to Bing?
Tim June 11, 2009 11:56 AM
One way Bing can challenge Google is to offer something similar or better than AdSense.
Blog Tactic June 12, 2009 9:21 AM
Why does everyone assume that Microsoft has to add something more to Bing compared to Google (which, by the way, in some ways it already has)? Microsoft is still battling Yahoo for number two. Microsoft can win market share by either taking it from Google or from Yahoo. More thoughts on Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo Thoughts.