Microsoft spends $100 million on Bing marketing but is it working?

By Tom Warren, on 26th Jan 11 9:36 am with 13 Comments

Will Bing rule the world?

Microsoft is reportedly spending around $100 million on marketing Bing, but has it made an impact yet?

Fast Company reports that Bing’s market share has been steadily growing. Experian Hitwise says Bing’s searches increased 5% last month, with Bing-powered searches now accounting for nearly 26% of the market (including Yahoo). Year on year growth rate in December was 49.4%, according to Barclays, compared with just 20.6% for Google.

“Our marketing campaigns are designed to market parts of Bing, such as Bing Entertainment at Sundance, or our football campaign, which highlights a lot of our sports features,” says Lisa Gurry, director of Bing. “We’re seeing increased perception and advocacy, which is driving our market share.”

The software giant’s “decision engine” now has 12% U.S. market share compared to Google’s 66.6% according to data from comScore. Yahoo’s market share dipped to 16% in December from 16.4% in November. Microsoft’s Bing search has increased its share consistently over the past few months. Bing grew faster in October than Google and Bing continues to rise in December. Bing reached an all time high of 11.8% market share in November but has improved upon the figure in December.

It’s hard to say whether the $100 million has been well spent yet. Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, recently compared Bing to a weed. “We bet on Bing and are growing like a weed in that business. So I feel pretty good about the bets,” said Ballmer. The comparison of Bing to a weed is a rather accurate one. Microsoft has shown it isn’t afraid to ensure Bing is everywhere. The software giant has pushed two minute video demos of Bing on iPhones, released Bing iPhone games and ensured Bing is making its way to the latest Toyota line of cars. The constant iteration and product updates also keeps Bing high in the mind-share of users. Microsoft appears to have followed Google’s approach with a number of UI and feature enhancements in previous months.

All the signs are there that Bing is making strong inroads and with the introduction of Bing as the core search engine for Windows Phone 7 it’s clear Microsoft is willing to use its full arsenal of products to boost Bing every step of the way.

  • Guest

    Seeing is Bing is integrated in WP7, perhaps they should be spending some of that money on expanding support in other countries. In Australia Google is the only real option for mapping and local support.

  • Moe2511

    They should spend those $100 million on making bing more international,
    they have the brain, they have the money and the weight, why so slow Microsoft.

  • Anonymous

    About Microsoft putting Bing everywhere. They also got Verizon to replace Google with Bing on some of its Android phones

    • http://www.winrumors.com Tom W

      Good point, another example of it.

  • Alvaro

    And you live in Australia, a big country. I live in Uruguay, where http://www.google.com.uy search for page in my country, Google Maps has every street of every important city, while http://www.bing.com.uy just take you to a latinoamerican page in beta.

  • Oime

    Gotta agree about making it more international , im from greece and then i type bing.gr it doesn’t exist it’s still .com , that saks <.<

  • Anonymous

    i will never use bing so they might as well stop using millions to make us… The truth is, google is the best for me…

  • Bnlf

    i think we will see that by second half of this year when they plan to release wp7 almost worldwide..they wont release something without the proper support. In brazil we already have xbox but still waiting for zune and bing = ihave to use a US live id to use all the features and thats lame

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_4WSQXLMPO52EF7MBQYYPKIWHQQ sai

    Just us Bing US version whereever you are. It is much better than using localized version.

  • Joe05

    Ive been using Bing for over a year now and find I don’t miss Google at all.

    Competition is good and I live having two strong search engines to choose from.

  • http://twitter.com/jarrichvdv Jarrich Van De Voord

    I don’t like the way Microsoft is advertising Bing as “Bing’s everywhere”. I just want them to invest in even better search algorithms, end-user experience and overall product quality. That will easily convince users, and users will introduce Bing to friends and so I starts… By becoming even better, the users will be the driving force behind the market share.

    (srr for poor English)

  • JohnCz

    Imo, Bing has a shot at picking up 4-6% this year in the U.S if Yahoo can stabilize and focus on growing traffic to their other assets. $100million would be worth every penny if they can do that. As far as expanding marketing efforts in other countries…I agree. It will probably be lockstep with Yahoo though. Btw, Yahoo just reported more than double their 2009 profits despite decline in revenue.

  • Zammy

    yeah, please release it in other countries. They only release the good stuff in the US and underestimate the rest of the world.
    Zhey could get so much more customers if they would release proper stuff in europe, but no, we have bing in beta for a year or so (so we actually have to use google), they release ESPN and all the other good stuff on the xbox 360 for US but not for europe but still want us to pay for it (so most of them choose a PS3 cuz it’s free).