The new comScore US search market share numbers are out for April, and they show another incremental (13.9% to 14.1%) rise. The rising trend, starting basically back when Bing was announced in June 2009, is accompanied this time by a bit of a rise in search share from Bing’s search partner Yahoo!. Together, the two properties captured 30% of US search market share for April, to Google’s 65.4% share.
The Microsoft-Yahoo! partnership only fully kicked in at the beginning of this year, but here’s a chart showing Bing, Yahoo!, their combined share, and Google, from 2009 to present:
(source: comScore U.S. Search Engine Rankings press releases)
Bing continues its steady upward climb, from some 8.9% share in June of 2009, to 14.1% today. What the chart (and most search share analysis) doesn’t show is probably a far more important number: something like revenue generated per point of share. Bing has positioned itself as a “decision engine”, but more precisely a shopping engine.
6 percentage points of market share gain is good, but if those searches are coming at the head of the “long tail” of revenue producing searches (ie: searches for shopping, travel, etc.), then Bing may be having a bigger effect than what the raw search numbers show. We’d love to see numbers that show searches by category, or revenue per search.
Microsoft has been pushing hard to gain share by seemingly any means possible, increasing exposure, for example, for efforts like Bing Rewards (which reward you for performing searches on Bing). Is the “decision engine” marketing working, are users are switching to Bing for shopping and travel searches? How are you using Bing?