Study: Microsoft Bing Is Better for Ads Than Google

Sponsored links attract about 80% more attention on Bing than they do on Google, a new eye-tracking study from consulting firm User Centric shows.

User Centric rigged 21 study participants with eye-tracking hardware and asked them to complete four search tasks using Bing and Google. About 42% of the participants look at Bing ads after each search, while only 25% of participants did the same looking at a Google search results page.

Click here or on the heatmap to see the difference.

Maybe there's something to this Microsoft Bing thing, afterall.

Here are the rest of User Centric results, from their press release:

• Google and Bing did not differ in terms of the amount of attention on the organic search results. In each search, all participants looked at the organic search results, spending an average of 7 seconds in that area.
• Attention on the sponsored links located above the organic results was similarly high for both Bing and Google. Over 90% of participants looked in that area during each search. As expected, during transactional searches, participants would spend more time looking at the sponsored results on top (~2.5 seconds) than they did on informational searches (~1.5 seconds).
• However, sponsored links on the right attracted more attention on Bing (~42% of participants per search) than they did on Google (~25% of participants per search). The participants who fixated on these links spent approximately 2.5 seconds looking at the area during transactional searches and 2 seconds during informational searches. These times were similar for the two search engines.
• Another difference between Bing and Google involved related searches. On Bing, related searches are shown on the left, right below the categories, while on Google, related searches are below the organic search results, towards the bottom of the page. Bing's related searches had a much higher visibility than Google's, attracting the attention of 31% of participants per search. Google's related searches attracted the attention of only 5% of participants per search.
• Most participants (67%) triggered a flyout at least once during the study, which shows that they are easily activated. Nearly all of these activations were categorized as accidental because participant's attention was away from the mouse pointer which triggered the flyout. Usually, the sudden appearance of an element in the visual field attracts attention but this was not the case in this study. Only 14% of participants (a quarter of those who activated at least one flyout) looked at the flyouts. Users' tendency to ignore the flyouts was likely a result of the learned strategy to devalue motion as a source of information on the Web. This behavior may be compared to "banner blindness."
• Bing's categories displayed on the left attracted much more attention than the flyouts. Half of the participants discovered the categories and three participants even selected a category to refine their search. Each of these three participants chose to use the categories on subsequent searches, which suggests potential value.
• The sponsored links at the bottom of the search results page did not generate any attention. None of the 21 participants looked at the bottom links on any of the four searches. This does not mean that users never look at the bottom sponsored links. Rather, the incidence rate of this behavior may be too low to detect with our sample size.

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Comments

[DRaymond]

This could just be a matter of familiarity, Users of Google already are conditioned to know where the sponsored ads are and how to ignore them.

[AllenShadow]

Just may switch from AdWords, although I didn't notice any serious advantages from a user perspective.

[cinemaven]

21 participants!? Is this some kind of advertorial?
bing isn't even ramped up properly yet so it's a bit of a bust as a search engine as of today. I tried 5 a dozen searches (which must be an appropriate amount considering 21 is enough for a headline stating Bing is better for ads than google) and it's not at all intuitive. None of the searches gave me what I wanted as a top 5 result and several searches where the size and traffic of a website would give a top google placement didn't have the same effect on bing.

I use google because I find it to be much more useful than yahoo (a personal preferance thing) but both are head and shoulders over bing at the moment and your ads can draw the eye but only if there's an eye to draw. A search engine has to be useful and intuitive to get the traffic that will eventually notice the ads...