Bing Users Twice As Likely To Click On An Ad Than Google Users?

Are people who search on Bing more commercial than Google searchers? According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55 percent more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.

Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 sites in a week in July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5 percent of the time on average, versus a 0.97 percent clickthrough rate for Google visitors and a 1.24 percent clickthrough rate for Yahoo.

One reading of this data is might be that Bing users are more susceptible to ads, and in fact may have used Bing in the first place because of the Bing ads Microsoft is plastering all over the place. (Kinda makes you wonder what will happen when that ad budget goes away).

But a more likely explanation is that Google represents the vast bulk of the traffic, 83 percent to be exact. Bing only represents 8 percent. There is a law of large numbers at work here. The more traffic that comes from any one source (i.e., Google), the lower the clickthrough rate is likely to trend. If the market share was reversed, Bing would undoubtedly have a lower clickthrough rate.

But that still leaves the question of just who are those people on Bing?

	impressions	clicks	CTR	% more clicks (Bing)
google	26,929,367	260,518	0.97%	55.11%
yahoo	3,157,648	39,008	1.24%	21.47%
bing	2,236,366	33,558	1.50%
total	32,323,381	333,084	1.03%

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