Bing Search Market Share – Day One

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.