I recently presented at the Autumn Fair, held at the NEC Birmingham, presenting a series of articles all about retail seo. In these presentations I was talking about targetting the right search engine when putting together a coherent search marketing campaign. As Google has been the search engine of choice for many years now and currently has around a 90% market share in the UK I always advise that if you're going to do seo / SEM you need to target google.co.uk and use this as your metrics for success.
With the introduction of Bing, I've been doing a bit of research into the effectiveness of the two search engines and it seems that Microsoft's 'new kid on the block' is giving far better conversion rates than Google! I just had to dig deeper to see exactly "why this is so" and how our retailers can benefit!
The company I work for durring the day, Intelligent Retail have hundreds of online retailers with e-commerce websites, all wanting traffic which converts well into sales. We therefore have to find the best channels to get conversions from website visits constantly and it appears that Bing is certainly bringing in traffic which converts well above average.
Conversion rate analysis of Bing vs Google
I've had a trawl through the Analytics data for Bing and Google traffic, and there is definitely a much higher conversion rate for Bing traffic compared to Google's traffic. This has been verified across many different accounts in Analytics. Here are some snapshots of some of the large amount of data that I analysed:
A typical Google conversion for our E-commerce shops
A typical Bing conversion, much higher than Google!
Analysing the data
Anyone well versed in conversion rate analysis will tell you that you are more likely to get visitors to actually buy products via an e-commerce website if the entry phrase into the online shop is further down the funnel of search terms i.e. further down the buying cycle - this means that longer tail keyphrases are more likely to convert into a sale than more generic terms. This makes sense, because if you think about it, any user who does not know a specific product name / brand starts off by searching for a generic term, say 'ski jacket' and is presented by a huge array of websites all vying for this term in results, yet a search engine user is not really likely to actually buy at this point. The actual sale is much more likely to come further down the search chain, when a search engine user is homing in on a particular brand / product.
So what is Bing doing better?
Again I've trawled through the data from a number of e-commerce websites at Intelligent Retail, and the data seems to suggest that Bing is serving up much more long tail results - these results are converting very well into actual sales (much better than Google's shorter tail terms.
Google short tail keywords at top of the list
As you can see below the much longer keyword strings being returned by Bing are more relevant to 'purchase level' searches, which is resulting in a much better conversion rate per search - this is not to put down Google as serving up irrelevant search results, but it's clear that Bing is either not returning top level short tail terms for all of the websites which I've analysed or this relatively new search engine is much better at picking out relevancy from actual product level pages in our e-commerce stores, thus indexing them where they should be.
Bing's much longer tail keywords at top of results
If you have any comments or any further analysis or data which either confirms or denys these findings we would be very interested to hear from you.
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