Bing’s usage during the month of September dropped off 5% even with the ‘decision engine’s’ advertising success and some gradual growth during the summer. Bing’s market share, the obvious statistic of choice, declined from 9.48% to 8.96%. The leader, Google, increased their share from 70.24% to 71.08% in America. Yahoo Search experienced a 3% decline, ending at 16.38% and is still the second most popular search engine in America.
If Yahoo and Microsoft ink their potential search deal, it could mean that Microsoft will end up with 25% of the market share in internet search. Though 25% sounds measly compared to Google’s 70%, it would be a much better base to start with than their current 9% market share.
These search engines are only one way of connecting people with websites though. Social media offers a plethora of options, but which of all these sources provides the most loyal users? Loyal users are a necessity to the life and longevity of a page and a new study by ad network Chitika, who analyzed the browsing habits of 33 million unique users over the course of September, found that Facebook provides the most loyal visitors.
20% of the link followers from Facebook end up returning to the site four or more times in a week. Digg was also tapped as a very loyal source for loyal page viewers, with a 16% rate of continuous return. Twitter did not fare as well though, only 11% of users become loyal after following links.
Surprsingly, in the real of search engines, Yahoo provided the most loyal visitors at 15%, followed by Google and Bing with about 12% each. These more loyal users, coming from social sites, offer a platform for marketers to reach in order to get the maximum return on their efforts and constant visitors. Perhaps SEO isn’t as important as most would think, and so long as you have someone on the inside of social networks providing links to worthwhile content you will create loyal users.
This information is useful to help marketers find out what is and isn’t working and provides even more incentive to get social. Just make sure your content is remarkable or those numbers will certainly suffer. Also interesting will be to see if either Microsoft or Google gets the deal done with Twitter to have real time tweets appear in search results and how this will affect the loyalty figures for users clicking Twitter links.
