Investing In Bing For Ecommerce Strength
Posted by Patrick Hare
Over the past month several of our customers have been interested in how Microsoft’s advertising push for Bing has affected their site traffic. Overall, there have been more Bing searches, but this doesn’t mean that overall search engine volume has gone up. This is because Bing is siphoning market share from its rival Yahoo, but it is not necessarily adding to search volume. This is because search engine use is demand driven, so people have to have something in mind before they make a query. Bing has made itself newsworthy through an advertising push that even includes buying Pay-Per-Click on Google for the term “search engine” and recent media reports indicate that its initiatives are succeeding.
How can the average ecommerce company profit from this news? If you haven’t established natural search engine positions on Bing (which are somewhat volatile on a week-to-week basis) then you can take advantage of the relatively low cost of pay-per-click advertising on MSN Adcenter.
Over the past few years, online stores with limited budget have put most or all of their dollars into the Google Adwords program. By expanding out into Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter, which places paid ads on Bing, there is an opportunity to get a foothold on search traffic that similar sized competitors may have neglected. There are even some very large companies who aren’t buying Yahoo and MSN ads, so small and medium B2B and B2C enterprises can get good conversions for a comparatively lower cost. Overall, Web.com Search Agency customers experience a higher conversion rate on Yahoo and MSN PPC platforms, due to a variety of demographic factors.
As a recent CNN report shows, Google dominated 65% of the search engine market for June 2009. However, this means that 35% of search engine traffic was being served through other channels. Bing and Yahoo comprised a combined 28% of online searches in the US, which is still a huge opportunity for big and small businesses. (Bing had 8.4% and Yahoo had 19.6%) Considering that competitive terms may get millions of searches every month, a presence on these engines makes economic sense. Even if you are going after terms that only get a few thousand searches a month, missing 35% of them could be the difference between prosperity and bankruptcy. There are some nuances to each platform that take time to learn, but any qualified search engine marketing agency should have no problem setting up a campaign for all major search engines.
About the Author: Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group.