Bing Cashback: The Shopping Engine
One aspect of Microsoft’s Bing that has been a particularly bright light in its successful launch is Bing Cashback. Increasingly price conscious and search savvy consumers as well as their recession tightened belts have made Bing Cashback a welcome addition to the search world. It seems in general, that Bing had placed its initial focus on purchase-based searches. Whether it is booking flights, getting directions to a restaurant, or buying a new digital camera online, Bing’s results are stellar. Microsoft watcher Mary-Jo Foley pointed this out and noted that it was Microsoft’s deliberate strategy to tweak Bing to be a great shopping engine. She says, “’Decision Engine” was a euphemism for shopping engine.” Not a bad way to gain market share, especially in the UK, where transaction/shopping sites make up 3 of the top 10 most visited sites (from clicks).
Microsoft has pushed this angle in many ways. In Europe, Ciao.com was purchased to operate as Bing’s shopping facet. As an established and popular price comparison site, Ciao has brought many online shoppers to use Bing. Furthermore, Microsoft put out a huge promotion in the US in August, in which Bing Cashback would double the money given back to a buyer from the brand. For example, if Cannon returned $10 from the purchase of a camera, Bing would make it $20. This went over extremely well, so well in fact that Microsoft had to end the promotion a full four days early, as they reached their cap on the amount of money saved. A TV ad for Bing Cashback was also aired in the US, adding to an already potent TV advertising campaign.
It would appear that Microsoft has decided to go after the purchase based share of searches in order to gain some ground on Google. In my opinion a smart move, as long as the other more research or news related searches are heavily considered as well. The world is searching more and more, with 113 billion searches in July, an increase of 41 percent year on year. In a clearly determined and persistent move to receive more of these searches, Microsoft is trading search revenue for market share by using Cashback as a traffic driver for Bing. Senior Director of Microsoft’s Online Audience Business, Frederick Savoye, recently said that in this release, Microsoft focused on helping users get the best results for searches that involved spending money. A clever angle to take in order to scoop up what Google has left out, to harness current trends in online spend, and to provide an appealing platform for online advertisers.
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