Chitika, a veritable fountain of data lately, has generated some new interesting findings from activity on its search-based advertising network. The company compared ad click behavior on Google and Bing and found that Bing generated about 50% more clicks:
Across the sample of nearly 15 million impressions used for this study, Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time.
However among the engines, Ask wins the prize for most clicks:
These data are consistent with isolated earlier data that show more conversions coming from AOL and other engines vs. Google.
Chitika speculatively attributes the greater clicks on Bing to how the engine’s now defunct Cashback service conditioned users to respond to ads. I’m not sure I’d make that leap.
I asked Research Director Dan Ruby if there was any demographic information available on the differences in the audiences. He said there was not at this time.
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