Bing Delivering Cha-Ching For Marketing, Study Says

Microsoft's new Bing search engine outperformed predecessor Microsoft Live Search by 23% in a study comparing ROI for marketing campaigns, according to an online agency. Question for CIOs looking to drive greater business value: are you and your teams out in front of this Bing thing?"Using the models to look across all our clients' campaigns, we see a significant impact to ROI since Bing was released," said Steve Kerho, senior vice-president of media, analytics, and marketing optimization at digital agency Organic in an interview with Laurie Sullivan of Online Media Daily.

"When ROIs rise, it gives us more flexibility to do more things with the same amount of money," Kerho says in the article. "When ROI declines, I have to take money away from another project and change the project mix."

Now, while very few people ever tried to claim that Microsoft Live Search was a rip-roarin' killer search engine, 23% is still a very impressive performance increase. And as CIOs and IT organizations get more deeply involved in revenue-generating facets of their businesses, that type of edge can't be overlooked.

The article notes that another agency has also experienced an uplift from Bing: "Efficient Frontier reported a 13% increase in paid-click share for Microsoft during the second week following the launch. New data shows that as of the first week in August, Bing lifted click share 44% since the beginning of June."