According to the latest data from ComScore, Microsoft's Bing search engine received the largest increase in total share in search for the month of November. Bing received approximately 9.9% of all search queries in October, this increased to 10.3% in November. Google saw a smaller share increase - 65.4% to 65.6%. Meanwhile, Yahoo continued its slide - falling to 17.5% from 18% in October. For the October numbers, please see my earlier blog post.
Mostly Good News for Bing
This obviously is mostly good news for Microsoft as more people were likely using the search engine for doing their holiday shopping. The downside is that this increase in numbers for using the Bing search engine comes at the expense of Yahoo. Given that visitors to the Yahoo.com properties will soon be using the Bing search engine, the preferred outcome for Microsoft would be for the increase in Bing market share to come at the expense of Google. That hasn't happened - at least not yet.
How Does this Help Me Market My Denver Small Business?
It is always good to have competition in the marketplace to keep costs down. In this case, as a Denver small business owner, competition among the major search engines will help to keep ad costs down. Google pretty much dominates the search market, and unless more competition for search ads emerges, the price to advertise on Google will continue to rise. Bing gaining in market share is good news - but it would be better news if search was more evenly divided among the search engines.
Denver Small Business advertisers should still focus their efforts on Google AdWords first to get the most data and results to base decisions on. If you're doing a significant volume with Google AdWords, then you'll probably also want to run essentially the same campaigns on Microsoft AdCenter as well.