Efficient Frontier Inc, which calls itself the world’s largest search engine marketer says that the number of clicks on ads served by Microsoft Bing.com search engine jumped 13% in the two weeks since it was switched from Live.com.
“Those gains are significant in terms of revenue,” said Justin Merickel, marketing vice president at Efficient Frontier, which places about $750 million in text ads on top search engines worldwide.
With the U.S. search ad market valued at $12 billion this year, each additional point in paid-click share Microsoft gains would be worth $120 million in annual revenue.
isn’t Live.com a category Killer domain name, so why is Microsoft more successful with name like bing.com? Why did they rebrand and what lessons can we learn from this, and apply to the domain industry?
Live.com is a better name. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a TV ad for Live.com and have seen continuous ads for Bing.com here in Southern CA. It appears that Microsoft has undertaken a powerful media campaign for Bing.com and it remains to be seen if the search engine will continue on an upward trajectory after the campaign stops. 13% improvement is not that impressive to me considering how hard they’re currently pushing it.
@Classifieds Theme
No, Live.com isn’t a category killer name b/c “Live” is not a category. A good category killing domain name must be specific and unambiguous (e.g. Cars.com or Furniture.com). The term “Live” is ubiquitous in our culture, and therefore could mean anything. At least “Bing” is somewhat unique and with proper branding will come to have its own meaning (see Google). It’s not a strategy I’d recommend for non-mega corporations, but for Microsoft, I don’t think it’s a bad choice.
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Microsoft might have learned their lesson with rebranding hotmail, which turned out to be a big flop. So this time they started something fresh. So I think what they did with bing is a good strategy, than rebranding live.
Three is a lot of speculation regarding how long this increased traffic will hold. Hitwise has put out a few reports regarding the nature of the Bing traffic (sample here: http://tinyurl.com/nqu3ll), which seems to be a lot of curiosity clicks but not as many repeat users as I’m sure they would like. As a search marketer I’m glad to see more attention being paid to engines other than Google, but I’m extremely skeptical as to how long this will last. I just don’t think Bing is offering anything innovative that will truly increase their market share in the long term.
MS spent a lot money on bringing Bing to market.
I’m not sure the traffic/searches are sustainable.
There have been a lot of discussion between MS and Yahoo about working together.
Wall St. stills think it was a mistake that MS did not buy Y.
But, that is a discussion for another day.
Yahoo stockholder meeting is tomorrow. Maybe, we will learn tomorrow if MS/Bing and Yahoo are working together again.
MS confuses me. ???
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