comScore recently released their report of the November 2010 U.S. Search Engine Rankings, as posted at the Webmaster World Forums for discussion. Not surprisingly, Google continues to lead the way with over 66% of all U.S. online search traffic. Bing, with 11.8%, slightly increased month-over-month, with a 0.3% lift, while both Google and Yahoo (16.4%) lost 0.1%.
I decided to go pull some reports for 4 of our clients, 2 retail and 2 in the financial services space, to see if the numbers would match up. The client traffic data I pulled was for the past three months to December 17, and the organic traffic ranged from a little over 500,000 visits to well over 2.5 million visits during that time frame. In all four situations, Google received more than the typically reported share, getting 69.5% and a whopping 75.3% for the two retail sites. The financial services sites also did well with Google, at 70.3% and 72.2%, respectively.
For the retail sites, Yahoo netted 14.5% and 10.7%, while getting 12.7% and 8.8% of their traffic from Bing. The financial services sites got 12.4% and 13.6% of organic traffic from Yahoo, with 12.3% and 11.4% from Bing. Based on these numbers, Bing is doing better along with Google, while Yahoo actually is taking a back seat, trending with the recent sentiment about it closing some popular social spaces.
There is a shiny silver lining in the data for both Yahoo and Bing. I also observed the total revenue from organic search driven by each engine to 3 of the four sites I researched (no conversion data for one of the Financial Services sites). In each case, the percentage of revenue driven was lower for Google and higher for Bing and Yahoo. The most extreme example was the retail site with 69.5% Google traffic and 14.5/12.7 Yahoo/Bing traffic: the revenue actually broke down to only 63% delivered through Google, with Yahoo responsible for 15.4% and Bing a relatively whopping 17.3%
Numbers can sometimes be misleading, and this type of research is required to fully understand which search engines is driving business more effectively. No one would give up on Google given the numbers above, however they may wish to dedicate a little more effort to Bing.
Join the discussion about the market share at Webmaster World Forums or feel free to comment below on that or the mini-case study.
