While Comscore and others have been talking about the bump in search traffic that Microsoft is getting from the launch of the Bing search engine, we have yet to hear much about it’s advertising performance. The format of the search results pages on Bing introduce some new elements and features which might lead more users away from ads.

Fortunately, that does not appear to be the case. The Search Agents blog reports that since the switch to Bing they have seen the following changes across a cross-section of Microsoft adCenter client accounts:

Click Through Rate (CTR) up 15%

Conversions up 6%

Conversion rate up 18%

Cost per Acquisition (CPA) down 3%

They attibute these improvements to more selective and relevant ad placement on the new engine. They note that impressions have decreased overall, but the improvement in CTR and conversion seems to compensate for that. All of these findings are very early, and most of them are based on limited (rather than global) datasets, but frankly we’re encouraged about the prospects for advertising on Bing.