Clickthrough Rate Analysis: Bing vs. Google vs. Yahoo!

Back in July, the Chitika research team looked at how often Bing users clicked on ads when compared to Google and Yahoo! users. Bing users showed a 50% higher ad click rate than Googlers, so at the time our preliminary conclusion was that Bing’s success was being driven in a big part by Microsoft’s huge, expensive advertising blitz.

Now that December is upon us, and Bing keeps showing its ability to push Google from a technology standpoint, they decided to revisit and see how the numbers were looking. As it turns out, Bing users are still clicking on ads at a prodigious rate – in fact, the CTR of users who come to the Chitika network via Bing is over 75% higher than those who come from Google.

Now, it must be mentioned that Bing is still a distant third place in terms of traffic sent – Google dominates with 84% of search traffic, followed by Yahoo! at 7.40%, and Bing holding at 5.75% (AOL and Ask both have just over 1% of search traffic coming into the Chitika network). However, all things being considered the same, driving one Bing user (or AOL or Ask user) to your site can be more valuable than driving one Google user.

The Raw Numbers:

Search Engine	Ad Clicks	Impressions	Ad CTR	% of Search	CTR Vs. Google
AOL	42,597	1,706,858	2.50%	1.27%	253.56%
Ask	34,437	1,958,490	1.76%	1.45%	178.65%
Bing	134,536	7,741,724	1.74%	5.75%	176.57%
Google	1,115,452	113,332,938	0.98%	84.13%	100%
Yahoo!	136,506	9,972,035	1.37%	7.40%	139.08%

Numbers are based on a sample of traffic from the Chitika advertising network.

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Clickers Are More Likely to Click

People who search by clicking the button on Google’s homepage are fifty percent more likely to go on to click an ad than people who search by any other Google means, according to online ad network Chitika. The study, which looked at just over 11 million impressions, shines a light on the possibility and importance of being able to predict web users’ activity.

When comparing the different types of traffic that come through their advertising network, the researchers at Chitika compared the different types of Google traffic – people who click on the “Google Search” button, people who search by hitting the enter key, people who search from browser toolbars, etc. While the overall clickthrough rate for the entire Google-searching sample was 0.95%, the people who searched by clicking on the search button at Google.com clicked ads at a 1.56% rate, over half again higher.

Type	Impressions	Clicks	CTR
All Google Searches	10,307,849	97,440	0.95%
Google Button Clicks	767,209	11,934	1.56%

But the question becomes, why such a high disparity? Why are people who type in their query and hit enter so much less likely to click on an ad than someone who performs a search differently through the same website?

“Sophistication is my guess,” says Rand Fishkin, SEO guru and CEO of SEOMoz.org. ”Hitting enter means you’re not moving your hands away from the keyboard and likely indicates a more tech-savvy (and hence, click-sensitive) individual.”

So it appears that advertising click rates are inversely proportional to the “tech-savviness” of the people receiving the ads. By defining a user’s tech-savviness, it’s possible that ad networks going forward will be able to target better and better, driving revenue for websites while showing less ads.