Bing Testing Search Ads Mixed with Organic Results
One of our analysts, Emily Kirk, spotted Bing mixing in paid search ads within its organic results. I am not able to duplicate this myself and I haven’t seen this pointed out elsewhere, but here’s a screenshot:
It’s tough to say how this might influence ad performance if it rolls out to more users, but surely some will find this a poor user experience. It’s good to see Bing testing, but I don’t see this being the answer to their RPS concerns.
Is anyone else seeing this?
Wowzers! Great eyes, Emily!
It looks like Barry Schwartz was able to confirm this with Microsoft. Unsurprisingly, not much detail was offered other than to confirm that they are testing this: http://searchengineland.com/bing-tests-ads-within-organic-search-results-86957
Ohhh..this is amazing..People will confuse if they mix results like this and might be Bing thought of misusing this to more leads..If this is clicked means Google will also try the same thing i guess.
Looks like someone from the old Yahoo paid inclusion team is working for Bing. Bad user experience at it’s best! This shouldn’t last long.
oh Mr. Jordan Meyer. you mean the product that was a goldmine for advertisers and increased relevancy within the yahoo search index? how does that contribute to a “bad user experience”. just because you register a .com and portray yourself as a ‘search marketing specialist’ belies the simple fact that many Fortune 500 companies reveled in such an offering.
ps- it’s bucket testing…get over yourself…
Its just another failed attempt by microsoft wo make a seach engine to beat google. How long will bing last untill the next version of ie comes out and they change the default search provider? Guess they need to fund ie 10 some how.
The format is slightly different than the organic results (placement of URL, length of description) so anyone familiar with search will still be able to tell that this is paid, but it could be confusing to some. People don’t like to feel that they were tricked. This could be a bad strategy for Bing.
I would say organic search is almost dead at Bing! If you are willing to advertise, you are included in priority search results. Advertisers will get their moneys worth on a temporary basis only! Wake Up MSN!