Chitika looked through 32 million ad impressions across its 50,000 strong network during a week in July to generate its findings, which has raised some eyebrows and caused a lot of discussion in the search community.

So does this mean you should drop what you’re doing with Google and move all your PPC over to Bing because users are 55% more likely to click through to your site? I don’t think so. The main reason being that Google still provides 65% of search traffic – I would take 0.97% of 26,929,367 over 1.50% of 2,236,366 any day. (I love statistics)

There have been a lot of theories flying round as to why Bing’s click through rate is so much greater including:

Type of User

Are Bing users more trusting that Google and Yahoo users? Considering Microsoft’s $100 million ad campaign to win users, it makes sense that Bing would attract consumers susceptible to advertising. It also makes sense that the users coming to Bing from a display ad elsewhere would also be more susceptible to paid ad’s on their search engine of choice. However this then raises the question of how they are going to continue to grow their user base when the initial advertising budget goes away? Remember ASK anyone?

Law of Large Numbers

One idea that’s been put forward as a possible explanation is the law of large numbers – although I think people quoting this don’t really understand the meaning of the theory – this suggests that because more people use Google it causes fewer of them to click through to ads – which is simply not true (nor an accurate portrayal of the law of large numbers BTW).

I think it’s more to do with the quality of the organic search results returned by Bing.

To me it suggests that Bing users who navigate to pages returned in Bing’s organic search results, navigate away from the pages that Bing has identified as being “most relevant” by clicking on ads for other websites once the destination page is reached.

This suggests the page the the user clicked on, was not what they were looking for, ergo Bing’s organic search results are not as relevant as Google’s.

What do you think?

Anyway, during my break I managed to get 80% of decorating finished and I went for a game of bowling where I discovered it’s much easier to play on the wii. My highest score was ninety something and unfortunately for me this was way less than my mam’s who has only ever played once in her life. Once the bowling had finished I insisted on a game of pool to make up for my poor effort and unfortunately my girlfriend missed an easy black so again I lost.

As you can probably tell I am rambling on about nothing much so I will be off now and try to think of something more work related to blog about on my next post… I will probably need a pc for this.

We have already covered how to redirect using .htaccess, today I will be showing you how to achieve the same result using IIS.

For this tutorial, we will be re-directing the following:

http://example.com

http://www.example.com

http://example.co.uk

to

http://www.example.co.uk

1. Create a new websiteAs your website should already be up and running before creating the redirect, you should know where to access the IIS Manager.

   If not, Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.

   Once within the IIS Manager, you should create a new website (click to enlarge):

   

   Create a new website

2. Run through the Wizard
   1. Description:  The usual naming convention is: REDIRECT – Site Name
   2. IP Address & Port Settings: Set Host header to the URL that you want to redirect, in this example it will be: example.com
   3. Path:  Set the path to the location of the site you are re-directing to.
   4. Web Site Access Permissions: Tick the neccessary permissions for your root folder.
3. Setting the PropertiesLocate your website and go to Properties.
   1. Add the missing headers
      1. Click on Advanced next to IP Address
      2. Click Add
      3. Set the Port (80 by default)
      4. Type the host header value
      5. OK!
      

      Adding the Host Header Settings

4. Setting the redirectNow that we have added our host header values, the next step is to set where they are re-directed to.
   1. Click on the Home Directory tab
   2. Select “A redirection to a URL” from the radio list
   3. Enter the URL you want to redirect to
   4. Select “The exact URL entered above” from the check list
   5. OK!
   

   Setting the redirect

That’s all there is to it!

Test by entering the URL’s added to the host header value in the browser, and they should re-direct.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.