With the launch of Bing I was curious to see how much traffic it would drive to my clients’ sites.  So I dug into Google Analytics and pulled out the following data for ten sites of varying sizes (Note to Google Analytics team: please put Bing.com referrals in the Search Engines report instead of the Referring Sites report):

Bing Accounted for 5% of All Search Engine Visits
Not bad for the new kid on the block.

Bing Has Improved MS’ Share By About 2%
MSN & Live are still sending a bit of traffic to these sites.  If you bundle their referrals in with the Bing referrals and then compare them to all MS referrals from Monday May 18th, it appears that total MS share of search engine referrals has gone up 2.3% – I left out the data for one of the sites as we fixed a pretty glaring SEO issue that caused a dramatic jump in MS traffic.

Does Bing Have a Brand Preference Algorithm?
The sites that saw the most dramatic growth were “branded” local media sites (e.g TV stations, newspapers, etc.).  I asked one of Bing’s product managers whether Bing had it’s own version of Google’s brand preference algorithm (I am at the Microsoft Search Summit this week).  He speculated that these sites most likely saw big lifts because Bing has increased the presence of local news links throughout the experience.

Of course these first few weeks of Bingness (trying to work it into the vocabulary for you Microsoft) are more indicative of sampling and MS’ marketing push, so it’s all still up in the air, but I would say based on day one that Bing is well-Bung.

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14 Response Comments

  • Michael  June 4, 2009 at 1:46 pm

    That’s amazing, my sites are about 4-5% on average for Bing, as well.

    Much bigger impact than I initially thought it would have… must be some of the hype surrounding the launch.

    According to the e-mails I am receiving from Microsoft, we should see an even bigger result when they launch their all-out media blitz campaign over the next few months.

    I am only concerned with how easy it is to turn off Safe-Search within Bing… it might have a backlash from parents and schools.

    Michael
    http://halfhourworkweek.com

  • Jeff M Howard  June 5, 2009 at 6:54 am

    On a website bringing in over 30K per day I’m seeing Bing outperform Yahoo (during Wed & Thu).

    No referrals for 3 separate small biz sites with 10-15 visitors daily.

  • jlbraaten  June 6, 2009 at 8:24 am

    Check it today, Andrew. I’m starting to see bing show up as a search engine as of 6/5 on my site. It also shows up as a referring site now. Now I’m confused.

  • Mike  June 9, 2009 at 11:22 am

    Andrew, I and not sure about the % that I am getting from Bing, but I can say that I seem to be getting that same amount of traffic from live.com that I get from Bing.com

  • Brad  June 9, 2009 at 11:15 pm

    Interesting I am going to check my analytic s for a couple sites and check how well bing is referring me traffic.

  • SEO Joel M  June 11, 2009 at 10:31 am

    Very impressive… I do think it could be temporary improvement from their vast marketing campaign, or do you think these results will stick and improve? Bing is well bung lol

    Bing bing bodda boom

  • Ryan v.  June 16, 2009 at 1:34 pm

    Have to say, having only tried bing a couple times so far, yet I have been very impressed with the results overall.

    Of course I doubt if I’ll ever switch from Google for my everyday research and organic searching, but for images/videos/etc I think I might just switch to bing :]

  • MarcKroon  June 18, 2009 at 8:36 am

    I’m impressed with how well bing is doing right off launch.
    However, all msn’s webmaster tools are direct rip offs of google’s (among other things).

  • Taylor Cimala  June 19, 2009 at 2:39 pm

    I’ve actually seen an increase in Yahoo traffic as of late as well on several client sites. Got to imagine that the ads going around are making people try out other search engines as well and not just the new Bing.

  • Andrew Shotland  June 19, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Interesting Taylor. I just checked a couple of big client sites and the Yahoo traffic looks flat to down – although overall search engine traffic has been creeping up over the past three weeks – but that’s just because they have good SEO right? 🙂

  • Taylor Cimala  June 22, 2009 at 10:19 am

    Well I took it a step further over the weekend and grabbed search data from 13 different websites to take a look at Google, Yahoo and Bing/MSN/Live traffic. I compared June 1-14 to May 4-17 so that the first day in each span was a Monday. Just looking at those 3 engines, in the 3.02% decrease in market share for Google, Bing only got .57% of that increase. Yahoo accounted for the other 2.45%. Let me know if you would like to take a look at the spreadsheet I put together.

    Granted there was also a considerable increase in traffic over that timespan, so I can attest to your good SEO comment!

  • windows 7  July 1, 2009 at 3:58 am

    I doubt if I’ll ever switch from Google for my everyday research and organic searching, but for images/videos/etc I think I might just switch to bing.

  • Jean  July 11, 2009 at 3:29 am

    I notice some interesting traffic from Bing although it’s not a lot. The search engine is similar to Google in some ways and it’s fast as well. The search results are more or less same as Google. Would be good to see how successful Microsoft $80M-$100M advertising campaign to unveil Bing on tv and online would prove to be.