BizSugar.com › Online Marketing › Bing Throws Web Analytics for a Loop

The advent of a new kind of search engine - aka Microsoft's Bing - is affecting the way information is delivered and may ultimately force marketers to change the way they measure results.

Bing pulls content from indexed websites and displays the navigation path and variations on the search query off to the side. Clicking on the new keyword helps the searcher find information more quickly.

Preliminary data shows bounce rates on websites to have declined from people originating on Bing. But here's the catch: marketers don't know the person's originally search query, and they only have data on the last click.

Preliminary tests show a clear distinction in the keywords and the content driving traffic from Bing vs. Google and Yahoo.

One of the features in Bing that deserves attention is the rollover function. People searching in the video section in Bing can mouse over clips to view the content. This previewing doesn't "count," though in web analytics, which only measures the number of actual physical click that takes the person to the hosted site. Traditional web analytics (e.g., Webtrends, Coremetrics, Omniture) cannot measure the "rollover" view.