This piece of information might come as a surprise to many internet users, and even the most savvy of searchers out there.
According to a recently published Tweet from the Bing Ads team (see below), Bing enjoys a very respectable 23% share of the UK search market. But how accurate is this figure? We thought it was worth briefly diving in for a closer look.
Bing is bigger than you think! #SEM #PPC #bingadswebcast pic.twitter.com/fFtEDvM634
— Bing Ads (@BingAds) August 17, 2017
It’s right there in plain English; they are claiming figures which have surprised many in our industry. The latest approximate figure from W3, the standards agency for the world wide web, suggests the reality is closer to 18% though this does vary from industry to industry.
Alban’s Bing Stats
So what do Alban Creative say about the numbers? Well, let’s take the monthly stats from one of our clients; we can’t say who it is, but we can say they are in the home improvements sector. Also please note this does not include direct traffic, we’re only looking at search engine referrals today.
In this example the Bing numbers account for only 9.6% of total search traffic. Still a significant chunk, and not something to be ignored by any means, but 23% it most certainly is not.
How important is Bing?
Okay, so Google clearly has a massive advantage and perhaps even a monopoly when it comes the search market. Nobody is denying that, least not the SEO team here. What is important to consider though is that whilst even 9.6% doesn’t account for much on a smaller site receiving a few dozen hits a month, for one seeing 1000 unique visits that’s 96 people.
Imagine if you had a market stall and 1/10 of the people walking past didn’t even notice you were there. You’d want to remedy that pretty quickly!
Google is still king for now, but the underdogs are all increasing their market share over time. Even the once lampooned DuckDuckGo is proving itself a serious contender.
