Is there something different about BING?

[Pat Coyle]

The chart above shows the average page views per visit generated by people who found Smaller Indiana via search engines over the past 30 days. For point of reference, site visitors who come to SI directly without aid of search engine typically view just over 4 pages per visit.

As you can see, Google referrals view approximately 3 pages per visit, but Bing referrals view over 5 pagess, which is the highest of all sources of traffic.

Why is this happening? Is it merely that the sample size of Bing visitors is too small to accurately compare with Google? Is there something about the Bing technology that makes search results more relevant? Is there something about the Bing user that makes it spend more time on SI?

Is there something different about BING? Share your thoughts here

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[Colin Clark]

I'm not much of a fan of Bing. I wrote a post about this the other day. It seems that they put way too much emphasis on domain age. What I find is that some of their results are stale and outdated. In a world where twitter search allows us to find information that is brand new and cutting edge I don't see how this is a good differentiator for Bing.

[Paul Waltz]

Bing is interesting for sure and may be worth investing time in in the future, but Google will always have the iron grip on search. Those 576 visits from Bing may have more page views per visit, but those stats are still paltry when compared to the massive 23,740 visits from Google.

[James Friesen]

Interesting... I was looking at AdSense stats the other day for one of my sites and noticed that my click-through rates for Bing visitors was about 7x higher than Google. Of course, just like your stats, my Google visitor numbers dwarfed my Bing numbers, but I did think it was interesting that my Bing visitors were much "better" visitors.

I'll have to keep watching that to see if the trend continues, and even more importantly if my Bing numbers keep climbing at a higher rate than my Google numbers.

[Aaron Douglas]

While not the biggest fan of Bing, I have begun to see some value in using it as it seems to serve up "fresher" results than google. We have seen our client sites perform extremely well WHEN THEY ARE ACTIVE, both from a content and link placement perspective, but quickly fade away when they've been stagnant for more than a few weeks. These same sites seem to mature in google, moving up or holding strong with age. Of the 3 major engines, Bing has been the quickest to respond to our efforts, at times taking only a few hours to index and adjust for new content, links, etc, whereas influencing google results can feel much like a cargo ship changing course.

That being said, relying on Bing results feels like a gamble, and I have growing concerns about the potential "abusability" of their decision process. While I will still use Bing for entertainment purposes, google is my go-to when relevance and authority are high priority.

[Douglas Karr]

One of the bigger opportunities in paying attention to Bing is that it's a standard search engine for many corporations. If you're focused on B2B sales, you may want to pay extra attention to Bing!

[Mike Seidle]

As traffic from a source increases, the bounce rate generally goes up and the page views per visit goes down. This is not surprising since Google is delivering Smaller Indiana nearly 40 times more traffic.

Doug's got a pretty good point about b2b as well.