User Decline Is Steady As Microsoft's Bing Loses Some Of Its Pow

October 29, 2009 1:38 p.m. EST

Marlborough, MA (AHN) - Fewer and fewer individuals are trying out Bing, according to a new study released on Thursday by Internet advertising research firm Chikita. Analysis of the network traffic from August through the first half of October, show's Bing's share of search impressions has declined at a steady rate. Simply put, the number of people using Microsoft's newest decision engine has declined very quickly.

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is the current web search engine from Microsoft. Bing is a direct replacement for Live Search and went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.

In August, over 8 percent of search engine users and 6.7 percent of search traffic came from Bing. Since then, however, Microsoft's impressions share has dropped to 5.44 percent, and the user share has decreased even more significantly, to 6.28 percent.

Based on the dramatic user decline, it appears as though Bing's advertising campaign had a very positive effect over the summer, convincing users to come over and try out the new service targeted to take some of Google's lion share of users. However, Bing seems to have failed to retain the bump in users who came over, who have migrated back to - or never truly left - Google.

Bing launched several high profile marketing campaigns targeted at high end users. The company sought out an affluent, educated, socio-economic demographic based on a selection of choices they ran their ads.