In the first month on the market

Jul 14, 2009 07:15 GMT  ·  By

To mark the end of the first month since it introduced Bing on the market and killed off Live Search completely, Microsoft has made public statistics indicating consistent growth for its search traffic. According to Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president, Online Audience Business Group, the number of unique users that ran queries in the company's reinvented and self labeled decision search engine has increased by over 8%. It is important to note that, in parallel with the launch of Bing, Microsoft has also been running an advertising campaign with an estimated cost of up to $100 million, an effort that is only bound to continue.

“We’re gratified to report that there has been some great interest in trying out Bing and that those experiences are yielding positive results,” Mehdi revealed. “We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading. Based on our own polling, we have also seen the number of people “likely to recommend” Bing double in our debut month. This is an important metric to us because we think it speaks to Bing’s ability to meet your needs, be they for general purpose searching or for searches to help you make smarter decisions in one or more of our four focus areas of shopping, travel, health and local.”

According to statistics made available by Internet metrics company comScore in mid-June 2009, Bing's share of the search engine market jumped by 3% in just the first two weeks since the new service was introduced. In this regard, comScore noted that Bing was up at 12.1% after the first two weeks in June from just 8.0% in May 2009.

“On Bing Shopping, we’ve seen a nearly 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback. Summer is typically not high season for online shopping, so this has been really nice to see. We hope you’re finding some great deals. If you missed it, here’s another recent post on how to take advantage of Bing cashback,” Mehdi added.

Another search vertical that enjoyed an explosion in terms of the volume of eyeballs crowding to the screen is Bing Travel. Microsoft indicated that Bing Travel's traffic jumped 90% month over month since launch. Mehdi noted that this increase in traffic “highlights a strong reception to some of the great features designed to help travelers make smarter, more informed decisions on their airfare and hotel purchases.”