The Value Of Google vs Bing Traffic [2022] 

A lot of SEO effort goes towards optimizing content and websites for Google and Bing.

And rightly so. It’s quite evident now that organic traffic from Google and Bing can pretty much make or break your business.

But, that also raises the question: How valuable is a click from Google as compared to a click from Bing?

If you are running ads on your site or e-commerce conversions, what sort of post-click activity can you expect based on the search engine the user is coming from?

For example, would a user coming from Google be different from the one coming from Bing?

Thanks to data provided from Chitika’s study, we were able to get some critical insights into post-click activity once the user clicks on an organic result from the search engine.

So without further ado, let’s see the results.

Here is a Summary of Our Key Findings:

The post-click value of a Bing click is almost 55% more than that of Google

Before we proceed, let us look at the methodology here:

Study Methodology

This study was done using data from the Chitika network in 2009.

In July 2009, Chitika Insights published a study examining the post-click CTR on Chitika ads based on what search engine they arrived at a site. Analysis of the study data revealed that the user arriving from Bing was almost 55% more likely to convert into a transaction.

To study how post-click CTR varies depending on the search engine, Chitika Insights examined tens of millions of online ad impressions (almost 32M to be exact) where users were coming in from search engines. The user was referred to the page via a search engine in all these impressions. The user visited a Chitika-hosted site from a search engine page.

Chitika extracted the search engine that the webpage was on from the referring URL within the last search results page.

From this, Chitika Insights measured the CTR based on the search engine. The data set was drawn from a date range within July 2009 and composed 32,323,381 ad impressions. Given that Chitika served tens of millions of search impressions at that time, this would undoubtedly represent a statistically significant sample.

Let’s dig in deeper now:

Raw Results

For the technically inclined, here are the raw results. In this study, we use the post-click CTR on ads as the metric for the click value. For more about the study, do check out this Techcrunch article based on data we shared with Techcrunch.

Now let us dig deeper into the key findings:

Bing Click 55% More Valuable Than Google

The initial goal of our study was to see what happens once users click off a search engine.

Since we ran one of the largest ad networks, the best data we had available was the CTR on the ads. This metric served as a good proxy for post-click behavior.

We noticed that visitors who got to a site via clicking on a Bing SERP page exhibit dramatically higher ad click-through rates (CTR) on the following website.

What is clear from the data set is that although Google drives most of the traffic, the post-click transactions from Bing were almost 55% higher.

This key finding seems to make intuitive sense since Bing users tend to be more commercial-oriented.

Also, Bing does not have as much market share as Google – which could mean that their users are more concentrated and more likely to convert.

Key Takeaway: Bing Click 55% More Valuable Than Google

Some Observations

1. It is crucial to keep in mind that these data do not necessarily mean a site should tailor all of its SEO efforts to focus on Bing.
2. But do remember that a click coming in from Bing most likely has almost 55% more value. So take your traffic numbers from Bing and multiply by 1.55 to truly understand its overall value.
3. If you have not already optimized your site for Bing, this data should give you incentive. Do calculate what some additional effort to Bing would bring you in terms of conversions on your website – whether those be ad revenue or e-commerce transactions.

Summary and Conclusion

Again, I’d like to thank the Data team at Chitika for making this study possible.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we collected and analyzed the data for this study, here is the methodology that Chitika used for all its studies.

And in case you are curious, our new company, Poll the People, will be doing lot more studies like this. For example, this is how you can test your Google Ads with real people to improve performance. It might even be applicable for SEO (like optimizing titles, descriptions, slugs) – but more on that later.