Microsoft has grown its share of paid clicks for its Bing search engine by a healthy 44 percent since the beginning of June, a search marketing firm reported this week. The share gain for Bing was particularly strong in the search engine's Travel and Finance categories, according to a report by Efficient Frontier.
Bing, a rebranding of Microsoft Live Search, came out of the gate fairly strong after its early June launch by Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, expanding its paid click share by 8 percent in its first week of existence as compared to that held by the pre-Bing product in its final week, according to the marketing firm. And Microsoft's challenger to search market leader Google nearly doubled that growth in its second week, the last period that Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Efficient Frontier looked at before this week's report.
"[Bing] did particularly well in both the Travel and Finance categories, showing an 11 percent and 22 percent click share lift in these categories," writes Justin Merickel, vice president of marketing and product development at Efficient Frontier.
"Microsoft's new category-focused Bing features may have helped them capture more of the seasonal summer travel searching and the additional query volume related to the stock market recovery. Furthermore, the announcement of the Yahoo-Microsoft deal may have promoted additional searches on Bing as users check out for themselves the new service."
Google, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., seems to be taking the challenge from Bing seriously. The company this week took the wraps off an infrastructure update to its search engine called Caffeine -- though Google has denied that Caffeine was a reaction to "Company X or Y ... doing Z."
