In its report, mainstream targeted search advertising network Chitika revealed that surfers arriving at a website via a Bing search were 75 percent more likely to click on an ad than are surfers arriving from competitor Google.
Interestingly, the reasons may go well beyond the search engines themselves and into the realm of the companies behind them, as Chitika also found that Microsoft's Internet Explorer users are much more likely to click on online advertisements than are Firefox or Safari users — and will click up to 80 percent more ads than do Google Chrome users. Windows users, they claim, also click on twice as many ads as do Linux or Mac users.
While such reports are enough to send traffic-starved adult webmasters scurrying for Bing-centric marketing options, the caveat that "your mileage may vary" truly applies, as these are the reported numbers from one mainstream network over a specific time range. Other marketers have reported substantially lower results and even results dramatically poorer in comparison to their existing efforts when incorporating Bing into the mix — although this can result from approaches that are not optimized for the new platform.
There is also the question of agenda when reading into the various numbers that are put out there — where competitors would like to see you either waste your ad dollars, or keep you from discovering a bonanza of profitable prospects — and will craft their public comments appropriately.
Overall, however, many search engine marketers have reported seeing up to 25 percent increases in their return on Bing traffic as opposed to the results they obtain from their Google efforts.
Do-it-yourself types that haven't tried Bing yet can make use of the site's webmaster tools, which were designed "to improve your site's rank across all search engines." They also allow users to submit URLs and XML sitemaps to Bing, and receive information on which of your web pages have been indexed, as well as their back-links, inbound links and the performance of search keywords. Crawl issues can be identified, robots.txt files can be validated — there's even an SEO Toolkit introduction video and a whole lot more.
Check it out for yourself: use Bing's webmaster tools to see if Microsoft users convert better for your own website.
