Chitika, a veritable fountain of data lately, has generated some new interesting findings from activity on its search-based advertising network. The company compared ad click behavior on Google and Bing and found that Bing generated about 50% more clicks:
Across the sample of nearly 15 million impressions used for this study, Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time.
However among the engines, Ask wins the prize for most clicks:
These data are consistent with isolated earlier data that show more conversions coming from AOL and other engines vs. Google.
Chitika speculatively attributes the greater clicks on Bing to how the engine’s now defunct Cashback service conditioned users to respond to ads. I’m not sure I’d make that leap.
I asked Research Director Dan Ruby if there was any demographic information available on the differences in the audiences. He said there was not at this time.
Related Topics: Google: AdWords | Microsoft: adCenter | Microsoft: Bing | Stats: General | Stats: Search Behavior
Is it possible that the differences in clicks can simply be attributed to search relavency? The more relavent a search result, the fewer clicks would be needed to locate desired information, correct?
I have not dug into the data yet, so this may be covered there, however it seems that 1% of Google may still be worth significantly more than 3% of ASK based on the sheer volume of Google searches versus ASK searches. Knowing why Bing or ASK works better could be useful to getting more out of Google, but doesn’t the massive size of Google still indicate that you need to know how to play that game first? Am I missing something? It’s an interesting headline, but does it really change the strategy. If yes, how?