However, there are some catches. Bing puts ads at bottom of page, but they were never seen by anyone. People don't scroll through the search results on Bing as much as on Google. This is because they don't have to -- they are more likely to find what they are looking for at the top of the listings in Bing than in Google. This shows that Microsoft has been successful in presenting its results better than Google.
However, this also has consequences for ad placement. Because people are less likely to scroll, ads that are in the bottom half of the page will be seen less often. This places a higher premium on getting a top PPC listing than was the case with Google.
This will have several consequences for advertisers. First, it will encourage bidding wars, so it is likely that PPC rates in Bing will be higher than in Google, though this may take some years to evolve. Furthermore, Bing is pushing hard to extend its advertising affiliate network. If people are bidding more for Bing ads than Google ads, it will make Bing a more attractive proposition for affiliates than Google, simply because an affiliate will earn more from Bing's higher-priced ads. In the long term, this could lead to Bing having a more extensive affiliate network than Google. Part of this drive will inevitably include affiliates switching to Bing from Google, so as Bing's affiliate network grows, Google's will shrink.
Ad value
None of the above would matter much if there was no difference between Bing visitors and Google visitors when they hit your site. However, there is a big difference -- Bing visitors are better.
You don't need to look at studies, or even the search engines themselves, to work out which visitors are better for your site. You can determine this by looking at bounce rates. Looking at the client sites I analyze, the launch of Bing was instantly obvious -- bounce rates for Bing visitors are around 3 to 4 percent lower than bounce rates for Google visitors. This is true both for visitors from PPC ads and from native listings. Once people are inside the site, they act in the same manner. However, in the case of PPC, you've still paid for a visitor if they bounce, so the bounce rate becomes an extra cost to factor into the ROI of the ad campaign. With Bing that ROI will be 3 to 4 percent better.
I only analyze a limited number of sites, so I considered the possibility my data could be unrepresentative. I contacted James Carswell, an ad manager at Periscopix, a specialist PPC agency. Carswell confirmed that the bounce rate for Bing visitors is better than Google's across all their clients and across all sectors.
When it comes to tracking conversions, the picture is more complicated because Bing only sets a seven-day cookie, compared to 30 days for Yahoo and Google. This makes tracking all conversions that originated with a PPC ad difficult. With a longer cookie, Google can claim a higher percentage of conversions than Bing. Yet even under these limitations, Carswell says Bing still shows better performance conversion rates than Google or Yahoo:
"As far as we're concerned," he said, "Bing is great in terms of traffic quality; we just need a lot more of it. For smaller clients, it's often not even worth creating a campaign on Bing because we wouldn't see enough traffic to make it worthwhile."
Carswell also feels Google's ad management interface is better than Bing's.
"Their adCenter system is certainly not as easy to use or powerful as Google's, and their desktop editor falls well short of what Google's AdWords editor can do. The other downside to Bing's conversion tracking is that it can't track sales value whereas both Google and Yahoo can. All we can track is the total number of conversions."
Bing has only been out for a few months. As anyone who has ever bought a new Microsoft product knows, Microsoft doesn't release mature products -- they launch as soon as possible, then rely on user feedback to fine-tune performance. Microsoft takes user feedback very seriously. On that basis I fully expect Bing's adCenter to evolve.
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