At the Microsoft AI event on last Thursday, I had a sit down with Kya Sainsbury-Carter, the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, who told me that clicks on ads within Bing Chat are higher than clicks on ads in traditional search. 1.8X higher to be exact and with shopping ads, specifically in Bing Chat, it is 11% higher.
Kya Sainsbury-Carter also said that dwell time, the time people spend on a page, is higher on Bing Chat than traditional search.
Those are my notes at least from our conversation, I did ask Microsoft's PR team to validate those numbers but I have not heard back yet.
This makes logical sense to me...
The Bing Chat interface is pretty clean when you compare it to the Bing Search interface. When you are reading a text based response from Bing Chat and you see large shopping ad with images and pricing, your eyes jump to it. This is less so in traditional search because those interfaces, if you look at them, are very busy and ad blindness is higher for familiar interfaces. Dwell time being higher makes sense as well simply because people spend more time chatting with the bot and reading longer answers than they do on a search results interface.
Search is driven to help you find something and go to that destination.
Generative AI is designed to have longer conversations with you and keep you there.
I mentioned these stats in my vlog-formatted video that I recorded on Thursday, here it is:
Note: I am posting stories today, Sunday, because tomorrow is Yom Kippur and I am not posting anything on Yom Kippur.
Forum discussion at X.
