According to data from the Chitika Ad network (since when did Chitika publicly become a data mining and reporting property?), Microsoft Bing driven users click on ads on 3rd party sites at a much higher click thru rate than both Yahoo & Google.
The study seems to have been put together specifically for coverage on TechCrunch, so let’s look at some of the numbers shared by Erick Schonfeld :
Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 sites in a week in July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5 percent of the time on average, versus a 0.97 percent clickthrough rate for Google visitors and a 1.24 percent clickthrough rate for Yahoo.
Of course, Bing only has a search engine market share of about 8%, and Bing users may be just getting accustomed to the format, but these numbers may further explain why a Yahoo Microsoft Deal is even more important and makes so much sense, as the two search engines do attract similar audiences because of their content networks and would combine for a 30% market share if Yahoo were to power its search via Bing.
Post Yahoo deal, given the increase in 3rd party CTR% and other numbers, one would think that a centralized Microsoft Ad Serving system across Yahoo, Bing & MSN aligned properties would be an easy sell… especially with Yahoo serving ads on the sites which it sometimes directs users to, for example via the Newspaper consortium.
One question which comes to my mind about this data is, CTR is nice … but what about the conversions?
