San Francisco — Microsoft’s aggressive thrust for their new search engine Bing has finally started to pay off. According to recent Hitwise statistics that shows how well Bing Shopping is faring. Bing’s Shopping has managed to achieve a phenomenal growth since the site launched at the beginning of June 6 to the week ending August 8.
During this period, Bing Shopping has increased by 169%, according to the information supplied by Heather Dougherty of Hitwise. Bing Shopping entered the firm’s category of Comparison Shopping Tools at number 8, with 4% of visits within the category. Last week, it reached 4th place with 11%.
This is good news for Bing, which between June 6 and Aug. 8, visits to Bing Shopping increased an incredible 169 percent.
Bing has managed to capture the ground on the competition in increasingly spectacular strides. Furthermore, the main search engine is growing every month, a situation likely to continue through and beyond the imminent Yahoo pairing.
Chart Courtesy — Hitwise:
Hitwise’s statistics indicates that Bing Shopping’s market share increased by 169% from the week ending June 6 to the week ending August 8. Out of a roster of 12 shopping comparison sites, Bing Shopping began the period in 8th place, but ended the period in 4th place. In just two months, Bing Shopping went from capturing 4 percent of market share visits to 11 percent. This makes Bing the overall most visited comparison shopping tool.
“Nearly 30% of the traffic to Bing Shopping was referred from Bing (18.32%) and MSN (11.34%) last week,” explains Dougherty. “Of the visitors to Bing Shopping referred from Bing, 66.81% were new visitors to the website (have not visited in the past 30 days) and 49.88% from MSN were new. Additionally, 5.86% of visitors were from Google (75.01% new) and another 3.54% were from Yahoo! Search (68.41% new).”
An interesting factor is that Microsoft last year introduced a cashback offer for its shopping comparison site and saw an immediate return. Last week, Microsoft unveiled a “Double Cashback” promotion on Bing Shopping and the results are plain for all to see. Now, maybe Microsoft should offer Triple Cashback and see what happens then.
Consumers actually appears to be shifting to and using Bing’s offering. 5.85% of the visitors to Bing Shopping deserted from Google with 75.01% of them being new users, and 3.54% came from Yahoo! Search with 68.41% of them being new users. The rest of the visitors to Bing Shopping came from Bing (66.81% new users) and MSN (49.88% new users).
This figure is the first actual information that shows Bing may really be around to stay, and actually compete with Google by stealing some of their share of the traffic.