14 DAY TRIAL // While traffic and user numbers may be growing for Microsoft's new decision engine, it looks like the advertisers are a little more reluctant. In fact, online advertising research firm AdGooroo found that first page advertisers may have dropped in the first month after Bing's launch even though overall Microsoft's advertiser base has increased in the last year. The other main search engines saw a similar trend.
“We measured a 5.46 percent increase in first-page advertisers in May (just ahead of Bing’s release) but saw a 3.31 percent decrease in June,” said AdGooroo Founder and Chief Rich Stokes. “The data also uncovered substantial decreases in ad coverage; so Bing is serving up significantly fewer first page ads than Live Search had served previously. This is great news for Bing users and advertisers since reduced ad coverage typically improves the user experience and indicates less competition for advertisers that decide to get in the game.”
All of the three main search engines saw a drop in first page advertisers in June, with Bing having the biggest drop, of 3.31 percent, followed by Yahoo with a 2.43 percent drop. Google fared a little better, with only a 2.31 percent decline since last month. Year over year the numbers are a lot better, all of them having a bigger advertiser base, with Google seeing a 53 percent rise, Bing 35 percent and Yahoo trailing with only 14 percent.
The share of advertisers using a certain service also dropped last month, with 78.2 percent of them buying ads on Google while 25.8 percent used Yahoo and only 12.9 percent Bing. The numbers account for advertisers using multiple services. Compared to June 2008 though, both Google and Bing have a bigger share while Yahoo dropped from 31.8 percent.
It is difficult to know if the numbers for Bing are a result of the new launch or they're just part of the overall trend in the online advertising market, which has been declining in 2009 with the weak economic conditions.