After just over one month in market, we wanted to take the opportunity to THANK YOU for all your feedback and support of Bing and provide an update on our early results. We’ve been really pleased to hear so much positive feedback, and we appreciate all you who’ve taken the time to pass along your ideas on how we can continue to improve.

So how are we doing?

When evaluating progress, we measure ourselves on how we are helping each of our key audiences – consumers, advertisers, webmasters and developers. Below we’ll provide some details on progress we’ve made and important milestones with each group.

Consumer

We’re gratified to report that there has been some great interest in trying out Bing and that those experiences are yielding positive results!   We saw 8 percent growth in unique users to Bing.com in June, which is an important indicator that you are trying Bing and the word is spreading. Based on our own polling, we have also seen the number of people “likely to recommend” Bing double in our debut month. This is an important metric to us because we think it speaks to Bing’s ability to meet your needs, be they for general purpose searching or for searches to help you make smarter decisions in one or more of our four focus areas of shopping, travel, health and local.

On Bing Shopping, we’ve seen a nearly a 3x increase in site visits and a 5.42% increase in transactions to Bing cashback. Summer is typically not high season for online shopping, so this has been really nice to see. We hope you’re finding some great deals. If you missed it, here’s another recent post on how to take advantage of Bing cashback.

Traffic to Bing Travel has increased by 90% month over month since launch, highlighting a strong reception to some of the great features designed to help travelers make smarter, more informed decisions on their airfare and hotel purchases. More information on how to use Bing Travel to find great travel deals can be found here.

We have really enjoyed the interaction we’ve had with you here on the Bing Community Site, as well as over on our Bing Facebook page and Bing Twitter feed. It’s been fun and informative, and we look forward to the ongoing dialogue. We also have Facebook pages and Twitter feeds for Bing cashback / and Bing Travel /, if you’re interested in getting regular updates specific to shopping and/or travel. And don’t forget the Facebook Photo Contest we’re running to get your photo onto Bing.com!

Lastly, stay tuned for a new set of Bing ads on TV in the coming weeks, where we start providing some detail on lots of the cool features that can help you Bing & decide!

Advertiser

On the advertiser front, we’ve been hearing from many of our search advertisers about early results they are seeing on Bing. Here are a few examples.

• Since the launch of Bing, TigerDirect has seen sales and order volume triple, and seen both conversion rate and average order size increase significantly. Based on this early success, TigerDirect has increased its search marketing spend with Bing by twofold.
• One IT provider has reported 36% higher click volume, 43% lower cost-per-click and 400% higher click-through rates in June.
• A large wireless communications company’s campaigns have received 28% more clicks since Bing launched than in previous weeks.
• One PC manufacturer’s impressions have increased 46% since Bing launched.

If you’re an advertiser and want to learn more about advertising on Bing, check us out here.

Webmaster and Developer

At the end of June, we unveiled the Bing Toolbox, an organized set of tools and resources specifically for webmasters and developers. It’s a one stop shop to help you take best advantage of Bing.

One great indicator of interest from this community is the number of developers who’ve signed up to use the Bing API. That number has doubled since we launched to more than 11,000. These developers recognize the power of the Bing API with its flexibility in rendering, ease of re-ranking results and most importantly – its free and unmetered use. Those developers are also writing more apps with Bing – the incoming requests to our API have shot up more than 50% since launch. Here’s a recent post about one cool app built on the Bing API by CareerBuilder.

We also launched the Will Code for Green contest to encourage people to use the Bing API to build interesting applications that help people deal with the worsening global economy or improve the ecology of the planet Earth. We’re still accepting submissions through August 12.

If you’re a webmaster, check out our Webmaster blog and forums. If you’re a developer, check out our Developer blog and forums.

So What’s Next?

It’s been a busy month, but we’re just getting started! There is so much opportunity and work to be done to improve today’s search and push beyond into new areas, such as our focus on searches that lead to decision making.  We have a long term view, and we are committed to steady progress over the years to come.  Thanks for giving Bing a try, and we look forward to your continued feedback as we improve.

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, Online Audience Business Group