Notes on measuring Microsoft Bing traffic

Analytics · By On · 9 Comments

Microsoft released its new search engine, Bing, this past Mon­day (two days ahead of sched­ule). For­tu­nately, Omniture’s Prod­uct Man­age­ment and Engi­neer­ing teams were ready for the release, mak­ing report­ing on traf­fic gen­er­a­tion via Bing avail­able in Site­Cat­a­lyst and other tools in the Online Mar­ket­ing Suite imme­di­ately. (You can read the press release here.) I’ve had requests from a few read­ers for notes on Bing report­ing, so I thought I’d give a quick sum­mary and answer some com­mon questions.

If you check your Traf­fic Sources > Search Engines — All reports, and if your users have been using Bing to reach your site, then you should already be see­ing traf­fic. You don’t need to do any­thing in your Site­Cat­a­lyst imple­men­ta­tion; SiteCatalyst’s core search engine mea­sure­ment is not depen­dent on JavaScript plug-ins or code ver­sions, so as long as you’re receiv­ing refer­rer data, you’ll see data from Bing.

Microsoft Bing data in Omniture SiteCatalyst

You should have this data begin­ning at around noon U.S. Moun­tain Time on Mon­day, 1 June 2009.

Will this affect my Uni­fied Sources VISTA rule?

No. The infor­ma­tion that Uni­fied Sources uses to cat­e­go­rize organic and paid search traf­fic has been updated to account for searches from Bing. Note that this update occurred roughly 24 hours after Site­Cat­a­lyst began report­ing Bing searches, so you may see a dis­crep­ancy between Traf­fic Sources reports and your Uni­fied Sources reports with respect to Bing data on 1–2 June 2009.

How does Bing affect Search­Cen­ter functionality/reporting?

Bing’s paid search results come from MSN AdCen­ter, which already inte­grates with Omni­ture SearchCenter.

Microsoft AdCenter in Omniture SearchCenter

This means that the change doesn’t affect your Search­Cen­ter man­age­ment, report­ing, bid rules, etc.

What about Bing’s video thumb­nail playback?

One of the most compelling—and prob­a­bly controversial—features of Bing is the abil­ity to play Flash video thumb­nails directly in the video search results:

Microsoft Bing's video thumbnail playback

If you mouse over any of these videos, they will play right there on Bing​.com, even though they are hosted on your site. Bing does this by pulling your FLVs into its own SWF for play­back. Unfor­tu­nately, this means that these play­backs can­not be cap­tured using Action­Source. How­ever, if the user clicks the video to view it on your site, play­back will be cap­tured normally.

Do I need to make any changes to my Paid Search Detec­tion settings?

Paid Search Detec­tion can be set up to use the same query para­me­ter across all paid search engines by select­ing “- Any -” in the “Search Engine” drop down within the Paid Search Detec­tion setup area in the Admin Console.

SiteCatalyst Paid Search Detection

If you have set up Paid Search Detec­tion this way, you will not need to make any changes in order to track paid searches from Microsoft Bing.

If, how­ever, you have set up a dis­tinct query para­me­ter for var­i­ous paid search engines, as shown in the screen shot below, you will need to add an entry for Microsoft Bing by select­ing it from the Search Engine drop-down menu and then enter­ing the query para­me­ter that you use on your ad links within MSN AdCenter.

SiteCatalyst Paid Search Detection

As always, please feel free to shoot any questions/tips/suggestions to me by leav­ing a com­ment on this post, via Twit­ter (@OmnitureCare), or by e-mail (omniturecare@​omniture.​com). I always enjoy hear­ing from you!

  • Jonas

    We are using Site­Cat­a­lyst HBX, and for us it doesn’t seem like bing​.com traf­fic was rec­og­nized as search engine traf­fic from June 1st, but rather from late on June 3rd.

    The rea­son why I believe that is the case is that for the last few days the num­bers looks like this:
    June 1st:
    Bing​.com traf­fic in search engine list: 0
    Bing​.com traf­fic in refer­ing domains: 60
    June 2nd:
    Bing​.com traf­fic in search engine list: 0
    Bing​.com traf­fic in refer­ing domains: 61
    June 3rd:
    Bing​.com traf­fic in search engine list: 2
    Bing​.com traf­fic in refer­ing domains: 66
    June 4th (first few hours):
    Bing​.com traf­fic in search engine list: 6
    Bing​.com traf­fic in refer­ing domains: 6

    Will the traf­fic from the first days be retroac­tively rec­og­nized as search engine traf­fic, or is it from that per­spec­tive “lost”?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bgaines Ben Gaines

      Site­Cat­a­lyst HBX did begin to rec­og­nize Bing as a search engine on 6/3 at around 5:30 PM PDT. We apol­o­gize for the delay in updat­ing that tool. For a vari­ety of rea­sons, his­tor­i­cal Bing data will not be updated to reflect the change, but all Bing data should be tracked cor­rectly going forward.

  • http://www.funjet.com Mark Han­son

    What are the impli­ca­tions of Microsoft chang­ing their search engine domain for some­one using the chan­nel manger plug-in to set SEO campaigns(s.campaign) when­ever vis­i­tors click on an organic link from bing​.com to one of my sites?

  • Elaine N.

    I sec­ond Mark’s ques­tion. What are the impli­ca­tion for those of us who use the Chan­nel­Man­ager plu­gin? Will there be an updated ver­sion of the plu­gin avail­able for us to use?

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bgaines Ben Gaines

      Elaine (and Mark): Just wanted you to know that we’re aware of this need, and we have crafted a solu­tion that should help to update your Chan­nel Man­ager imple­men­ta­tion to account for Bing traf­fic. Please see the infor­ma­tion below.

      /* Bing Patch - start */
      if (o.referringDomain.indexOf('bing.com')>-1){
      o.scBingParam = s.getQueryParam('q','',o.referrer);
      if(o.scBingParam){
      o.campaignId=s.getQueryParam('[Insert your Paid Search Identifier Here]');
      o.channel=o.campaignId?"[Insert the Name of Your Paid Search Channel Here]":"Natural";
      o.keyword=o.scBingParam;
      o.partner='Bing';
      }
      }
      /* Bing Patch - end */

      This should be inserted as the first piece of logic that exe­cutes fol­low­ing the chan­nel­Man­ager call (after the first if statement):

      var o = s.channelManager(false);
      if (typeof o != 'undefined' && o){

      /* Insert Bing Patch Here */

      s.eVar1=o.channel;
      s.eVar2=o.partner;
      s.eVar3=o.keyword;
      s.eVar4=o.referringDomain;
      s.campaign=o.campaignId;
      }

      Full exam­ple:
      var o = s.channelManager(false);

      if (typeof o != 'undefined' && o){

      /* Bing Patch - start */
      if (o.referringDomain.indexOf('bing.com')>-1){
      o.scBingParam = s.getQueryParam('q','',o.referrer);
      if(o.scBingParam){
      o.campaignId=s.getQueryParam('psid');
      o.channel=o.campaignId?"Paid Search":"Natural";
      o.keyword=o.scBingParam;
      o.partner='Bing';
      }
      }
      /* Bing Patch - end */

      s.eVar1=o.channel;
      s.eVar2=o.partner;
      s.eVar3=o.keyword;
      s.eVar4=o.referringDomain;
      s.campaign=o.campaignId;
      }

      Note:
      [Insert your Paid Search Iden­ti­fier Here]=psid
      [Insert the Name of Your Paid Search Chan­nel Here]=Paid Search

  • http://www.thelostagency.com David

    While im not using Site­Cat­a­lyst HBX but Google Ana­lyt­ics ive also notice strange track­ing on one of my clients accounts sim­i­lar to what @Jonas noticed regard­ing the under­stand­ing of Bing as a search engine and not a domain.

    1st June — Domain 2 vs Organic 0
    2nd June — Domain 10 vs Organic 0
    3rd June — Domain 9 vs Organic 0
    4th June — Domain 8 vs Organic 0
    5th June — Domain 4 vs Organic 0
    6th June — Domain 2 vs Organic 2
    7th June — Domain 0 vs Organic 0
    8th June — Domain 7 vs Organic 0
    9th June — Domain 2 vs Organic 10
    10th June — Domain 1 vs Organic 5

    So why the spike back to see­ing Bing as a domain? im sure this is com­mon to other web­sites that are not using enter­prise level prod­ucts such as Omniture…

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bgaines Ben Gaines

      David: I’m not sure that what you’re see­ing there is exactly the same as what Jonas reported; I really don’t have any insight into how your Google Ana­lyt­ics account may have been affected by the intro­duc­tion of Bing, unfor­tu­nately. You may want to check the avail­able user forums and doc­u­men­ta­tion to see if oth­ers saw sim­i­lar things. There is also a vibrant web ana­lyt­ics com­mu­nity on Twit­ter; it’s likely that some­one there would be able to help under­stand what you’re seeing.

  • http://destinationweddingmag.com MG

    Ben, do you have any idea why, I’m still see­ing an extremely high num­ber of search refer­rals from live​.com, while still get­ting refer­rals from bing​.com? I find this really strange, I’m also get­ting a high num­ber of refer­rals from a sin­gle word term, that when searched i don’t even rank for in bing. Any ideas?
    Thanks MG.

    • http://blogs.omniture.com/author/bgaines Ben Gaines

      I believe I actu­ally worked with your col­league, May, on this ques­tion a cou­ple of weeks ago. She’ll have the full details, and for con­fi­den­tial­ity rea­sons I don’t want to give a full expla­na­tion here. Suf­fice it to say that we did come to a fairly clear con­clu­sion regard­ing the source of this traf­fic. Please let me know if I’m mis­taken or if you can’t get in touch with May to discuss.