Mittlerweile benutzen fast 10 Millionen Nutzer in Deutschland regelmäßig Bing, das sind 20 Prozent der aktiven Internetnutzer hierzulande.

According to several third-party sources, Bing’s market share is smaller than the 20 percent figure cited above. For example, the following is StatCounter’s search engine data for Germany:

Source: StatCounter

NetMarketshare generally agrees, showing Bing’s PC search share at just over 2 percent.

The combined Bing-Yahoo “search alliance” share in the US is about 30 percent. However the search alliance has considerably less reach in Europe. While the organic-results merger was completed last year, Microsoft adCenter is just now rolling out in Europe.

Related Entries

• Search Alliance Begins First AdCenter Testing In Europe
• December “Explicit” Search Numbers: Bing Now Ahead Of Yahoo
• Report: Google Controls 44 Percent Of Global Online Advertising
• Bing, Yahoo Now Neck & Neck In US Search Market Share

Specifically, Asian Yahoo search users in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam will now get Bing powered results. In addition, they also migrated over more European countries such as Greece, Poland, Romania, Switzerland (German, French and Italian languages) and Turkey. In addition to the transition of Yahoo UK to Bing back in August, which included Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Yahoo also said Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Russia, the Netherlands, Sweden, plus several countries in MENA (in Arabic language) have been moved over and of course all the previous announcements.

There is no word on the paid search aspect of these new countries as of yet.

Remember, Yahoo transitioned to both Bing powered organic and paid results in the US a while back.

Related Services:

• Yahoo UK & Others Switching To Bing Organic Results August 3rd
• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

The organic search on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy will begin transitioning over to Bing powered results this Wednesday.

Yahoo has not yet and will not yet transition over the paid search ads. Those will remain as is on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy. The organic results are the only things transitioning over on Yahoo UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

Yahoo completed their transition on the US property back in August 2010.

To prepare, Yahoo says:

• Compare your organic search rankings on Yahoo! Search and Bing for the keywords that drive your business, help determine any potential impact to your traffic and sales
• Decide if you’d like to modify your paid search campaigns to compensate for any changes in organic referrals that you anticipate
• Review the Bing webmaster tools and optimise your website for the Bing crawler, to help ensure your site is prominently listed in both Yahoo! and Bing organic search results.

Postscript: Microsoft posted their official blog post on this on August 3rd, the day of the switch over.

Related Stories:

• Yahoo Begins Testing Bing Powered Results This Month
• Yahoo Search Advertisers Can Now Begin To Migrate Accounts To Microsoft adCenter
• Yahoo-Microsoft Organic Transition Happening, Site Explorer, Search Monkey Holding For Now
• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance
• Official: Yahoo’s Results Now Come From Bing

It’s not clear whether this is limited to China or will be used in other markets where English is spoken. We’ve asked Microsoft for some additional color and perspective.

Baidu controls roughly 80 percent of the search market in China, according to several sources. Google is second with approximately 19 percent.

A Bloomberg report suggests the Baidu-Bing partnership is limited to providing English results to domestic Chinese users. If so those results will likely face the same censorship rules that Google rebelled against early last year.

We’ll update this post if Microsoft gets back to us.

Postscript: A Microsoft spokesperson offered the following general statement and confirmation of the deal:

Baidu and Microsoft have announced that Bing, Microsoft’s decision engine, will provide English search results to Baidu users in China.

Senior research analyst Mark Ballard looked at traffic from Conduit to Rimm Kaufman Group clients from before the toolbar company switched to Bing from Google at the beginning of 2011. Toward the end of 2010, when Conduit was still with Google, Ballard writes, Conduit sent RKG clients paid search click traffic that was equivalent to 10 to 11% of total Bing.com paid search traffic. Currently, using referrer data, Ballard sees around 5% of Bing’s paid search traffic coming from Conduit, and he estimates an additional 5-6% likely comes from additional searches after people are delivered to Bing.com.

The Conduit-driven traffic was credited for boosted the Search Alliance’s traffic beginning in January, but RKG’s analysis shows it shouldn’t get all the credit. Traffic on the Search Alliance was a little higher, all the same, though paid search traffic on Bing.com was fairly flat outside of Conduit.

As a search marketing agency, Rimm Kaufman’s Ballard raises the question of whether Conduit driving such a great percentage of traffic on Bing is good for marketers, since it can’t be excluded.

“When it was a Google partner, Conduit provided traffic that was worth about 2/3 as much to advertisers as traffic on the core Google.com domain,” said Ballard. “That’s a level at which some may choose to exclude it in order to drive more traffic at the same ROI from the core domain and the better performing partners.”

According to this Yahoo blog post, Bing is now powering the Yahoo back-end for organic search in:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Mexico

Bing started powering Yahoo’s organic results in the US and Canada last August.

Yahoo said:

Today is a momentous day for us, as Yahoo! has completed the process of moving search ad serving for Yahoo! to the Microsoft Advertising adCenter platform in the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, this marks the completion of the transition of advertisers’ Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts to adCenter.

From now on, to manage the ads displayed on Yahoo US or Canada, you need to manage them on Microsoft adCenter. Yahoo said that Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts will change to a read-only state, as early as tomorrow. And you will be able to access the Yahoo accounts over the next five months via the same log-in you have used previously, so that you may view historical data from the past 13 months.

Microsoft commented on the CPC prices, which we have seen spike up recently, due to the transition. Microsoft said, “As advertiser demand grows and drives competition in the adCenter auction, the increased competition may result in higher costs per click (CPCs) in the initial weeks following the transition. As advertisers experiment with bidding on each keyword to determine what works best for their campaigns, we expect these prices to stabilize within weeks.”

Here are some additional support notes from Yahoo:

Those advertisers who managed their Yahoo! Search Marketing accounts on a self-serve basis will now be exclusively supported by Microsoft. For account assistance, these advertisers should call (800) 518-5689, Monday through Friday between 4:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m. Pacific Time, or Saturday between 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. Pacific Time.

If you are a YSM advertiser managing your account(s) through a Yahoo! account manager, your adCenter account support is now managed exclusively by your Yahoo! account team, which has been guiding you through the transition.

On the mobile search front, the mobile search ads will be transitioned to the Microsoft Platform by the end of October. However, internationally the transition will happen in 2011, with all global customers and partners expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

This will be on both the Mac and PC versions of Firefox 4. Bing said:

We’re very excited to be included in the search engine choices in the upcoming version of Firefox. Having Bing in the “out of the box” list makes it easier than ever for the Firefox community to experience the benefits of Bing.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: The current default search engine in Firefox is Google, and that doesn’t seem to be changing. However, it’s a big boost for Bing to finally get included as an alternative choice, and one that’s long overdue, in my opinion. For some further background on Google’s relationship with Firefox and how Microsoft has been left out, see the posts below:

• Hey Firefox – Let Us Pick Our Own Search Engine!
• Mozilla Folks Attack Google On Privacy; Will Bing Finally Be Admitted Into The Firefox Club?

Last week, Yahoo’s organic transition to Microsoft Bing was complete. This week, Yahoo and Microsoft are starting the paid search transition. That means it is very likely that paid search at Yahoo in the US and Canada will be fully powered by Microsoft adCenter by the end of October.

The transition process is three steps:

1) Prepare your account for transition to adCenter

2) Transition your account to adCenter

3) Continue to manage your Yahoo! Search Marketing account

For more details, see the Yahoo Advertising Blog or the Microsoft Blog.

Bing has become a media darling—the press is bullish, reports all show growth, it’s David against Goliath, right? Still, I’m talking bearish thoughts here. Why? My caution stems from a KPI (key performance indicator) known as engine yield—a metric and concept related to those I’ve introduced in prior, articles, as well as in The Art of SEO (see chapter 9).

Engine yield is about more than just engine traffic volumes. It’s designed to dig deeper and help you understand the efficiency of each engine at converting your landing pages into meaningful search traffic. In a single-engine race, the metric is not all that useful. But in times of change, when one known algorithm is replacing another, the metric wields some predictive power. Case in point: to estimate the impact of organic traffic re-distribution on your business. And I don’t like what I see.

Understanding engine yield

The media talks about Google’s 68% share to Bing’s 28% (comScore). Yes this makes for compelling advertising; underdog stories and the like. But market share and traffic share are different animals. Large sites (most of which have been Google-optimized) typically have organic search traffic distribution patterns that look something like: 80% Google, 10% Yahoo, and 6% Bing (pre-August), 4% “other.” Now, that boils down to 80% Google vs. 16% Bing (10% Yahoo + 6% Bing previously)—a 5:1 ratio in real organic traffic produced by Google over Bing+Yahoo combined. But between Yahoo and Bing, the traffic-share difference is nearly 2:1 (10% vs 6%). In terms of market-share, Yahoo has 17% to Bing’s 11%, a market-share difference of 1.5:1 . So it’s logical to assume that Yahoo’s algorithmic results and Bing’s algorithmic results are basically interchangeable: they can be swapped with no negative impact on site owner traffic volumes. Right?

Not so fast. This is where engine yield comes into the picture.

You should analyze how many of your landing pages Bing, Yahoo, and Google each send organic search traffic to, and how much traffic each engine sends. On large retail sites, for every one landing page Bing produces organic traffic for, Yahoo produces organic traffic for about 1.5 pages (while Google produces traffic to about four pages, though Google is not the point of my argument here). This differential gets compounded by the volume of search traffic each engine sends to each of those landing pages: Yahoo sends about 1.3 searchers for each one searcher Bing sends (while Google sends about two searchers for each that Bing sends, though again, not the point of my argument). The bottom line: Yahoo’s proven engine yield on a per-page basis has been about twice (2x) that of Bing’s—as a result of higher volumes of traffic to each landing page, and across greater quantity of landing pages than Bing. This is a material algorithmic difference in engine yield!

I accept this difference may be partially explained by Google and Yahoo having larger audiences. Larger audiences conduct more diverse search queries which theoretically get directed towards a more diverse set of landing pages. But more importantly this difference in engine yield reflects—and projects, in my view—how fundamental algorithm differences can negatively affect the long-tail findability of landing pages that have been basically optimized for Google. I see Bing’s algorithmic engine yield acting as a sort “glass ceiling” on what Bing will yield, even when placed before Yahoo’s larger audience with different demographics and psychographics.

This is not meant to be critical of Bing at all, but I think it would be illogical for marketers to assume Bing’s algorithm will not just backfill, but increase in engine yield, against heretofore Yahoo’s superior engine yield. This is why I believe the Bing algorithm (as it exists) powering Yahoo’s search audience (as it exists) will mostly likely result in a real drop in Yahoo’s organic traffic level for large site owners—by as much as 30%—from Yahoo’s current 10% contribution levels towards 6% (Bing’s pre-August single-engine contribution levels).

Maybe I’m splitting hairs here. Is a 30% drop in Yahoo organic traffic material? In the bigger scheme of things, perhaps not. We still live in a Google-optimized world. If such a drop were to materialize, it would represent a real organic traffic loss of no more than 5% overall. Not huge. But in a recessed economy, and going into holiday season, that difference begins to really accumulate month-over-month. One of the advantages of the engine consolidation is that SEOs have just two engines to strategize over, not three, and can more easily overcome such minor losses.

The irony though is that overcoming such losses would be more easily achieved using Google-centric optimization tactics. After all, Google’s resulting traffic-share (not market-share) would, in this scenario, now reach 85% to Bing’s 14%—widening the yield gap to 6:1 (from 5:1) and further reducing Bing’s relevance to organic search marketers. This would be bad for all. (For the record, I previously outlined 50 ways Bing could become more useful for search marketers in order to promote healthier search competition. Continued algorithm innovation belongs on the list as well.)

I hate writing gloomy articles—there’s enough in the news to last these days. And I hope I’m wrong in my prediction, of course. Then again, hope isn’t much of a strategy. My recommendation for large search marketers: Don’t be caught by surprise. Focus on traffic-share, not market-share. Anticipate a 5% organic loss in your forecasts in the coming months. Conduct your own organic research and analysis as I’ve done above, and watch your engine yield trend-lines. Adjust your optimization plans now to offset losses that are probably occurring as we speak. If I’m wrong, you will be the better for it.