Posts tagged marketers

Earlier this month, Microsoft was launching an attack on Google saying its rival  is anti-competitive. Today, Bing is launching an advertising assault on Google, but will all this child’s play convince marketers to come on board to this new, super-dooper decision engine?

Microsoft’s search engine may trail Google in searches, but when it comes to Fans on Facebook, the tech giant ranks number one!

To cement its position, Microsoft is set to launch a major advertising campaign that will encourage UK users to start using its Bing search engine.

The campaign will run across major TV stations – something Google only started doing last year after 10 years in the game – and will urge internet users to ‘Bing and decide’.

Microsoft wants to help searchers make more informed decisions. Of course, actually persuading people to move away from a search engine that, for many, has become synonymous with the internet is going to be a tough ask.

Bing is new, fresh and not another ‘here today and gone tomorrow’ project, according to Microsoft. Its attack on Google has been described as “trench warfare” and it won’t be over in days and months but years, warns the giant.

However, a study by Catalyst Group shows that although users like the new search engine, they are unlikely to switch. 

A usability focus group, after using both engines, said they preferred Google, with only one third saying they liked Bing. That being despite the fact that 82% preferred Bing’s design, 64% preferred Bing’s organisation of features and another 64% preferred Bing’s refinement and filtering options. 

With regards to relevance of results, the majority of users thought both engines preformed equally well.  This goes to show how entrenched Google has become in our thinking when it comes to search. 

When it came to paid ads it seems that again Bing came out top with users spending 150% more time looking at the ad space at the top of the page, possibly due to the refinement options available at the top of the page. 

What makes Bing unique is its organization of results. Microsoft conducted extensive studies into how people used search engines, and what would make them switch before it even started to design Bing.

The challenge now for Microsoft is – as its own research revealed – that when choosing which search engine to use, the decision is subconscious. So even though studies show people might prefer Bing, most would stay with what they’re used to – Google.

Is that going to be the same chain of thought for advertisers and marketers?

The good news for Bing is its growing faster than Google did.

The bad news? It puts ads at bottom of the search page. Users of Bing don’t scroll through the search results as much as they would on Google because they don’t have to – by the very nature of Bing, the most relevant results are at the top. That’s the decision part…

This has consequences for ad placement. As users are less likely to scroll down, ads that are in the bottom half of the page will be seen less often hence placing a higher premium on getting a top PPC listing. This will encourage bidding wars, so it is likely that PPC rates in Bing will be higher than in Google.

But Bing is pushing hard to extend its advertising affiliate network. If advertisers are bidding more for Bing ads than Google ads, it will make Bing a more attractive proposition for affiliates than Google 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.

As anyone who is familiar with Microsoft knows, the company doesn’t release mature products. It instead launches to the marketplace as soon as possible and then relies on user feedback to fine-tune performance. So expect Bing to evolve, and quickly. Before you know it, we’ll be saying: “I Binged it”.