Microsoft’s Bing search engine has impressed many in the SEO and SEM industry for making impressive strides in a short space of time – becoming the third most popular search engine after only being officially launched in the US in June 2009.
Thanks to their new partnership with Yahoo to co-operate on search engine marketing and their recently announced plans for the Windows Mobile 7 platform, this share seems likely to increase in the near future. However, the most significant factor in the search engines growth may be another partnership – the one with social networking giant Facebook.
Data from Compete made available this week, showed that Facebook was the second largest site in terms of unique monthly visitors for the US – just behind Google. The data also revealed that Facebook has overtaken Google in traffic referrals to major Web portals like Yahoo, MSN and AOL, as well as ranking as the nearest competitor for other categories like Video or Movie sites.
Although both Google and Microsoft have arrangements with Facebook, Microsoft has the more significant arrangement. Bing is the exclusive provider for Facebook’s web search results and earlier this month, the two companies announced that they had “enhanced” their partnership. Effectively this meant that though Facebook would take over full responsibility for selling its own PPC/CPI display ads, Bing would continue to provide paid search ads that appear in Facebook search.
This arrangement means that search engine marketing via Bing can also reach users who spend their time on Facebook. The site is among one of the most popular destinations online and according to Nielsen data, the average user spends about seven hours a month on the site – and it continues to find ways to keep people on the site, from third-party apps to new social networking features.
According to Comscore’s latest numbers, Facebook’s own share of the search market increased by 13% from December 2009 to January 2010. Although these searches were more likely to be internal than wider web searches, Bing still powers those searches – and its PPC ads could easily be added to those pages in the future.
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