Increased Market Share for Microsoft, Thanks to Bing

(My Original Blog Post: http://remoteworkmate.com/increased-market-share-microsoft)
Based on comScore’s latest data, Bing ranked second a few days ago, beating Yahoo for a day. The internet audience has agreed that Bing, the new decision engine, has truly helped in boosting the market share of Microsoft on its initial week of release. The preliminary numbers were quite impressing especially since it’s just been a week since the decision engine was launched.

The Microsoft websites took 9% of the total search results from May 26-30 and Bing’s debut just started last May 28. Following the initial week of Bing, the numbers climbed from last week’s 2% to 11.1% this week.

As compared to Live Search, Bing is able to reach a larger internet audience; no wonder Bing has improved the penetration number of Microsoft websites from 13.8% (a week before Bing’s debut) to 15.5% last week. To most internet users, a week-long period is not enough to draw conclusions for the long term. However, the buzz on Bing is continuously increasing and only time can tell whether the site can make it to the top once more.

According to the vice president of comScore Mike Hurt, the initial data on Bing suggested that it ranked high and showed considerable improvements for Microsoft’s market share due to the early interest generated. It resulted to increased search engagement and immediate improvement on the position of Microsoft. Throughout the week, searcher engagement and penetration have been relatively steady.

Microsoft will now have to face the vital question asked by the online community – can Bing gain even higher market share in the long run? The advertising blitz launched by Microsoft was quite huge which reached over $80M. Such ads stressed on the weakness of search overloads and mocked the jumbled responses returned by major search queries. The ads can create a niche for Bing like shopping and traveling. The massive marketing campaign cost Microsoft a lot but because of the high rankings obtained by Bing, it was worth cost. To analysts, the surge in rankings of Microsoft was primarily because of its marketing campaigns. Will the numbers prove to be sustainable over the long term? Google occupies the top rank and it doesn’t need to spend anything to advertise its search capabilities unlike Microsoft.

The early numbers were promising for Microsoft. The point is, users tried Bing and if most of them were satisfied, they will surely come back. The strong debut of Bing has affected the internet community somehow. The steady engagement of users and penetration over the week revealed that it got repeat visitors; repeat visitors are very important for new websites.

The extensive launch campaign was able to attract lots of trial users. Bing’s ultimate performance can be proven if it is able to sustain the numbers months or years from now when the people have already gotten over the campaigns.

Still, the initial week’s performance can’t be forgotten. It’s rare for a new website to obtain a very high rank and Bing was able to create a buzz among internet users. Microsoft will simply need to ensure that it stays that way.