• by Rob Garner , July 22, 2009

I recently wrote about my predictions about the search share outcome for Bing ("Bing's Gain Will Be Yahoo's Loss"), as well as a few thoughts on the future market share of Google and Yahoo. Those predictions are intended for at least the next few months ahead, for reasons described in that column.

But today I wanted to share some findings about the actual share of search traffic that our clients are receiving during Bing's critical launch period, based on data from our company's analytics platform that is utilized by 60 companies in the Fortune 1000. The data offers a different perspective on search engine market share that you don't normally see with other search share reports, mainly because this is based on all actual aggregate natural search traffic to these sites, and not a sample. While I am not submitting this data as proof of what I wrote about in the last column (though the trends support my primary points), it may serve as an indicator of the true story to come after Bing's ad campaign dies down.

So here is the share of search total for actual clicks from natural search, across all verticals, for two five-week periods, pre- and post-Bing launch:

The data above represents only natural clicks, across all verticals. Also consider that we are comparing data month-to-month, which is not always the best way to compare actual lift (seasonal aspects can skew the view a bit, and year-over-year is often preferable). It is important to note that the real story won't emerge until a few months from now at the earliest, and also note that we are viewing a segment of the Web that skews toward Fortune 1000-level corporations, encompassing the verticals of travel, retail, finance, and technology, among many others.


Bing

Bing makes a slight increase during the first week (week beginning May 31) , and makes other slight 1/10th point gains thereafter, with the exception of the week of July 5. Overall its share gain is 0.6% at its highest gap in the second period, and 0.7% over both periods. Bing's average market share of natural clicks in the five weeks preceding launch was an average of 6.68%, and in the five weeks post-launch it was an average of 6.98%, an increase of only 4.5%, or 0.3% of total market share.


Google

Over the same period, Google's share of overall search clicks rose, with the highest difference being +1.5% overall share (from May31 to June 21) since Bing's launch -almost three times that of Bing's increase in share over the same time period (period 2). Google's pre-Bing share average was 77.6% in period 1, and rose to 77.8% in period two, a difference of +0.2%. Both Google and Bing's peak period was the week of June 28, while this turned out to be the lowest week for Yahoo, at 10.1% share of natural clicks referred.

Yahoo
Yahoo lost significant traffic between periods one and two (11.5% and 11.16% respectively), a difference of -0.32 percent share, and it appears that Yahoo is yielding share to both Bing and Google. Yahoo's high/low gap over both periods is -1.6%, though it picked up +0.5% in the last week shown. The week of June 28 is Yahoo's biggest problem in this assessment, as it dipped down to 10.1%, and pulls down averages for what are otherwise fairly consistent referrals in the prior weeks over both periods. Whether or not this is due to the July 4th holiday in the U.S. is not known, but it is worth noting that Bing and Google increased in referrals that week. Overall, while there is a downward trend in the last two weeks of June data for Yahoo's share, more data is needed, and this will ultimately be the race to watch (Yahoo going down; Bing going up).

But let's not take these early returns as the final word. That will come over time, after Bing's ads are gone, and the hype has died down, many months from now. But I expect that the long-term situation will net out very closely to the trends we are seeing here in the short term.