Bing Visitors More Likely to Leave Your Site

Ad Click Through Rate is 55% Greater on Bing than Google

Are Bing users more likely to buy or leave your site?  It all depends on how you want to look at the numbers. The Chitika research has uncovered that if visitors organically found your website via Bing rather than Google, they are more that 50% more likely to click a paid ad within your site.  Additionally, Yahoo users are more than 20% more likely to click on paid ad than Google.

Law of Large Numbers for Google?

TechCrunch explains this result as “the law of large numbers”.  Huh?  Never heard of this Law before but they seem to conclude that being the #1 search engine is why your ads would have a lower CTR % if they organically came from Google.  They theorize if Bing had the same volume as Google, they’d have a much lower CTR. TechCrunch is missing the whole point of the study.  And, their article title is completely wrong! There are two ways to interpret what the Bing 1.50% CTR is telling us:

1. Bing users find on page advertisements more appealing than Google users; or
2. Google is serving better results organically thereby lower the CTR because the on-page content is more relevant

Remember, when a visitor clicks on an Ad appearing your site, they are saying “I’m done, let’s see what this site has for me.”  Now, if that’s your conversion goal for that page then you have to love the Bing visitor. Of course, most of us are trying to convert the visitor to buy/sign-up/etc. something else on our site besides the advertisement. Is it fair to conclude then Bing isn’t serving up as relevant pages as Google?  Perhaps.  Bing is still in the infancy stage and it’ll need more time before you can draw more firm conclusions. If I were Bing I’d want that CTR to come down below Google’s CTR and spin it on TV as “Users find Bing SERPs to be more relevant and less likely to leave than Google.” That would be a very powerful statement for SEOs and business owners alike.