Marketing Charts has recently provided a report on the post-click engagement rankings of the 5 most popular search engines.

It provides some interesting insight, particularly with regard to the poor performance of Google, despite its popularity.  It is clear that more engaged people searching the Internet do so via search engines other than Google, and their engagement factor is dramatically higher via the top 3 search engines (in order of engagement): Ask.com, Bing and Yahoo.

Engagement factor is another measure of search engine performance

I have calculated a combined Engagement Factor from the Marketing Chart which represents “Average time on site” x “Average pages/visit”. The results in order of Engagement Factor are as follows:

Engagement Factor                         Index

1. Ask.com              512.53                                               150.6
2. Bing                     464.89                                               136.6
3. Yahoo                  371.76                                               109.3
4. Google                 340.24                                               100
5. AOL                      311.06

If one uses Google as the base index of 100, Ask.com performs over 50% better than Google, while Bing performs over 36% better. Even Yahoo has a rating that is higher than Google, albeit by a small margin.  Go figure.

In addition, of all the 5 search engines, Google’s bounce rate is the highest, at over 61%, which is by far the worst performance.

When considering your efforts in being attractive to search engines, does this change your view, and your strategy, at all?  Should it?

Marketing Charts: See the full table of information here