Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Land mentioned someting interesting about CTR on different engines as compared to Google. Google is apparently the bottom stringer for CTR and has been for some time!

According to Acuracast back in 2006, Google was trailing badly:

Search Engine Conversion Rates

* AOL traffic 6.17%
* MSN traffic 6.03%
* Yahoo traffic 4.07%
* Google traffic 3.83%

AccuraCast’s Conversion Rate Results

At AccuraCast, we conducted a smaller-scale study across some of our UK SME customers and found the results were not very different:

* Ask traffic 4.17%
* MSN traffic 3.79%
* Yahoo! traffic 3.39%
* Google traffic 3.33%
* AOL traffic 2.81%
* AltaVista traffic 2.63%

According to ComScore, in 2008 those numbers were some better, but in 2009 the gap began to widen again, according to advertising company Chitika:

As it turns out, Bing users are over 50% more likely to click an ad on your site than Google users. What does this mean? Well, for publishers, it means you should start concentrating on driving more Bing traffic to your site. For Microsoft, it seems to suggest that Bing’s success will last about as long as its advertising budget will carry it.

And again, this month, the trend continues:

Now that December is upon us, and Bing keeps showing its ability to push Google from a technology standpoint, we decided to revisit and see how the numbers were looking. As it turns out, Bing users are still clicking on ads at a prodigious rate – in fact, the CTR of users who come to the Chitika network via Bing is over 75% higher than those who come from Google.

In fairness to Google, it was pointed out by all the above and notably Chitika that:

One possible explanation of Google’s lower conversion rate could be that Google offers much higher volumes of searchers and more results – the combined effect of which statistically leads to lower conversion rates. Another possibility is that searchers often use Google as an information resource and are not always looking to make a purchase – which would lead to more visitors who do not intend to buy.

Would Bing and others still be able to maintain their scores if their search volume matched Google? Or is it simply the fact that their search volume is more shopping oriented that gives them the higher CTR?