Social Media and Marketing

Recently, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance rolled out its first big change to the public – Yahoo! organic search results are now driven by Bing’s algorithms in the US and Canada.

Published: 31 Aug 2010

Recently, the Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance rolled out its first big change to the public – Yahoo! organic search results are now driven by Bing’s algorithms in the US and Canada.

As web analytics company Compete points out for every search a consumer conducts on the Yahoo! engine, one can see the small but powerful words at the bottom of each SERP: “Powered by BingTM”.

In its recently analysis, Compete chose to look at Bing and Yahoo! as separate engines before the landscape changes.

(This data is purely for web search, and does not count a contextual link or a slideshow frame advancement as an additional query).

Overall in July, the search market continued its recent trend, with Google losing slight market share to Bing. The one notable shift in recent trend is that Yahoo, for the first time since January, increased its share of search queries in July.

• Search query volume across the 5 engines increased 2.0% from June to July, with both Bing and Yahoo seeing the biggest M-O-M volume increase.
• While volume on Google increased slightly, its share of the market declined by -1.1%.
• Yahoo and Bing both increased their share of the market, with Yahoo experiencing its first share increase (+3.0%) in 2010 and Bing steadily continuing to increase its share for 4 months in a row.
• The volume of queries originating from paid search is up slightly from June, which is reflective of the fact that paid ad spend has been increasing overall.
• In July, Google gained the most benefit from this industry-wide paid search ad spend increase.

New set of metrics

One new set of metrics that Compete is introducing goes beyond looking at the search market by volume and share, but measures the reach (number of people that are conducting searches) and the stickiness (average number of searches per person) per engine. Again, these numbers do not include queries conducted on vertical search engines.

A few observations about the number of people searching and how much they are using search:

• The number of people searching on Google has declined steadily during the year, staying steady in recent months. Google’s “reach” is declining.
• Some of these searchers may be going to the other engines, but it’s more likely that people are using vertical search and mobile search more and more.
• Although Google may be seeing fewer unique visitors searching on their engine, the number of searches per person has steadily increased during this year. So Google is becoming stickier for those that still use it.
• While Bing saw a decline experienced a slight dip earlier in the year, it has risen steadily since March. Bing searchers are conducting the most searches per person in July than all of this year. More reach and more stickiness.
• Yahoo has been fairly consistent in its reach, but for the most part, Yahoo has experienced a decline in the number of searches per person.

Travel sector

Google is highly valuable as a source of traffic to key U.S. industries, according to a recent analysis by online competitive intelligence service Experian Hitwise. Search engines continue to be the primary way Internet users navigate to key industry categories and this includes the travel sector, too.

Google accounted for 71.43 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending August 1, 2010. Among the top three search engines, Google delivered the most visits to the four categories below year over year. Google’s percentage of upstream traffic grew for the Automotive, Shopping and Travel categories.

Bing saw double-digit growth in four categories - Automotive, Health, Shopping and Travel - including an 84 percent increase in the Shopping category.

Challenge

Earlier this year, in an interview with EyeforTravel’s Ritesh Gupta, Google’s head of Travel, Retail and Automotive for South East Asia, Sajith Sivanandan, highlighted that users are expressing a preference through the queries they input while searching.

He added, “To me, delivering the best available, the most compelling offers exactly at the time of searching continues to be the biggest opportunity that both search engines and providers (suppliers and aggregators) are preoccupied with. The biggest unsolved problem therefore becomes this: how can we reduce the time to perfect fulfillment of the users’ online travel needs?”

Approach

Traditionally, online has been held to a much more stringent metric than offline channels and it is often bought with a very fragmented approach.

Barbara Pezzi, director of Web Marketing & e-Commerce, Fairmont Raffles Hotels, says she doesn’t find SEM any more complex than offline advertising.

“We do not have a blanket approach when it comes to SEM and ROI targets are set based on each property needs, budget, location, and other unique criteria. Portfolio bid management (same bid rules for a group of properties) would only be in place if the same person owns a set of properties and has requested for the campaign as a whole to have a certain ROI target,” she says.

Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010

EyeforTravel is scheduled to conduct a session about the current state of the search landscape as part of its forthcoming Travel Distribution Summit North America 2010 event, to be held in Chicago (13-14 October). Rob Torres, Managing Director of Travel Vertical, Google Inc, and Krista Pappas, Global Director & Head of Business Development, Bing Travel at Microsoft are among the speakers scheduled to take part in this session.

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