A Meaningful Bing Metric

As successful as Microsoft's introduction of its Bing search engine seems to be, Google presently is in no danger of losing its commanding online search market share.

But a new study shows that Bing already has one edge over Google, and in a way that is very meaningful to advertisers. From MediaPost Publications:

Yahoo may have several more reasons to adopt Microsoft's Bing.com to power its search engine. A study by the search advertising network Chitika suggests people who land on sites from organic search results via Bing are 55% more likely to click on an ad, compared with arriving on the site from Google.
Analyzing click-through rates from 32 million ad impressions across a network of more than 50,000 sites during seven days in July, Chitika found that people finding their way to sites from Bing clicked on ads 1.5% on average, compared with 0.97 percent for Google, and 1.24% for Yahoo.

This is significant in that online advertisers care less these days about ad impressions than they do about click-throughs and other indicators of reader involvement. It'll be interesting to see if that gap closes naturally over time or whether Google will respond with an ad campaign or similar counter-measure.