Mário Andrade

When improving a website you should make certain analysis in order to know where you are getting the better quality traffic when trying to achieve a given goal. Recently I was curious to know which of the top 3 search engines bring better traffic to monetize a website.

Google Analytics still does a lousy job at filtering click information such and the source from where the visitor that clicked on AdSense came from, number of clicks, etc.

My first goal was to isolate website mediums so I turned to some PHP and decided to show ads only to visitors coming from a given site: Bing, Yahoo and Google.
For this I used PHP HTTP Referer variable.
I ran this 1 week for each search engine, and came up with the following results:

As you can see, Bing has the best CTR of all 3 followed by Yahoo and in last place Google.
Techcrunch as written an article on this subject called Are Bing Users Twice As Likely To Click On An Ad Than Google Users?. This study was backed up by Chitika and that meaning it’s United States and Canada based so if you are from another country like myself where Yahoo represents only 5% of search traffic and Bing somewhere from 10 to 15% I advise you to make a case study before making any assumptions.

On Chitika’s study it’s pointed out that Bing users click around 50% more on ads than Google users and 20% more than Yahoo! users.

Here’s the table from Techcrunch:

Reading this data you have to be aware of one particular variable. Google is by far the best traffic source sending somewhere around 70 – 90% of traffic and Bing is somewhere around 8-15% of traffic to websites thus making Google achieve a worse CTR but from a much larger network explaining why the Click Through Rate is so low.

On the other hand Bing has, without a doubt, better CTR quality than any of the other search engines. From much less traffic came much more susceptible ad clicking visitors. I guess all doubts about optimizing websites for Bing have been shredded right now.