Oh, Bing. You’re everywhere lately. You’re on my television, interrupting my time with Stephen Colbert on Hulu, sending me emails asking me to call you Bing Ads now, and asking me to “Bing-it-on”. Well, like an annoying classmate telling me to call him by his Dungeon Master name now, asking me to please, please take his survey for science class; I’d rather just get it over with. So I did, and I made my co-workers share in the fun.
Bing touted that they beat Google 2 to 1 in a blind test. Well, guess what, out of 7 of us that took the challenge, only 2 picked Google. Those two that picked Google only picked them 3 to 2, too. We even had a guy pick Bing all 5 times. You read that correctly, we preferred Bing over Google 5 to 2 in the “Bing-it-on” challenge.
Don’t pop the cork on the bubbly just yet, though. My question to Bing, and to my co-workers: “So, now what?” I assume for Bing it’s that they’re hoping people will equate Bing winning this challenge with switching search engines. Well, I’m afraid to say that isn’t so. I surveyed all 7 of my co-workers and simply asked, “Are you any more likely to use Bing now?”. The answers surprised me. Here are some direct quotes:
“I do (feel more compelled to use Bing)…especially considering the ones I thought I was picking google on for sure were actually bing results. One of the times I didn’t pick bing was because it showed a linkedin profile twice in the top 5 results…so I think there’s still some wonkiness to it…but it’s closing the gap,
“I still like Google better no matter what they tell me.”
“Not really,
“I don’t know,
“Nope. But maybe less likely to laugh at it and more likely to consider it if I cant find anything on Google.”
So, it seems to me that all this whole challenge has done is make a couple of people take Bing a bit more seriously, but no one said they were even thinking about switching. Perhaps polling internet marketers was skewed from the start? I found it interesting that people were trying to pick Google on purpose, and that they felt Bing was still cheating a little when it did win.
All of these advertisements, the name change, and the challenge come off feeling a little desperate to me. I wonder if the gains are proving worth the effort? I know in our little PPC community, they’re coming under some fire for some changes to how they respond to questions on Twitter, some UI changes, and other stuff that’s changed during the big name change. PPC Expert Melissa Mackey (and fabulous heroconf speaker) wrote on her blog, “What’s Up With Bing Ads?” .
So, Bing, maybe stop trying so desperately to get everyone to like you, and maybe just keep working on getting your issues sorted out. Work on you, Bing, and we’ll all like you for who you are.
