{Tech Info Online}

As we are waiting for the releases of June search market share rankings from Comscore and Nielsen Netratings, Microsoft reveals that it received about 8% more hits on Bing during the month. Unfortunately, the increase in traffic has not resulted in any monetary advantage yet.

According to Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's online audience business group, overall unique visits to Bing grew by 8% in June. On Bing Shopping, visits jumped threefold and Bing Travel has seen a 90% increase in traffic. Mehdi pointed out that the search engine increased advertiser revenue, with Tiger Direct seeing its order volume to increase by a factor of three, which has led the company to double its search marketing budget.

However, SearchIgnite, a company that claims it is managing more than $350 million in paid search activities annually, said that Bing has had little impact on paid search advertising so far.

"The launch of Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, showed little impact on the company’s share of the U.S. paid search advertising market in Q2 09,” the company said. “While Microsoft’s share of spend remained flat, Yahoo! lost share to Google, which continues to dominate the search landscape, taking in 77% of paid search spend in Q2."

“Microsoft appears to be focusing its efforts on driving consumer interest and capturing increased search query share,” said Roger Barnette, President of SearchIgnite. “We have not yet seen this translate into more paid search advertising dollars for Microsoft, although typically consumer adoption precedes advertiser adoption.”