You’ve probably read reports about Google being the main source of search traffic across the web. It’s true – the vast majority of search engine traffic to your website will come from Google.

There are other sources of traffic out there, though. Let’s consider Bing, the web search engine from Microsoft. While it may only constitute a fraction of the search engine traffic your site sees, it still drives some users to your business.

Do You Have the Time? 

Are Bing analytics something you should pay attention to? Monitoring Bing analytics for business comes down to where you want to focus your time. If you are really limited in the amount of energy and time you can put into monitoring your web analytics, you’re probably better off focusing on Google Analytics exclusively. But, if you have the space and time (and it doesn’t require much), consider implementing Bing analytics into your business’s web monitoring.

Here are some of the reasons you should consider paying attention to Bing.

Detailed Site Activity

With Bing, you’ll be shown in detail where all your traffic is coming from, whether that’s Google, Bing, Yahoo!, or others. Additionally, you can choose to overlay your view of statistics on Clicks from Search, Appeared in Search, Pages Crawled, Crawl Errors, and Total Pages indexed for deeper insight into how users are interacting with your site.  Use these insights to get deep into page level keyword data. Here, you can identify opportunities where impressions may be high but you have a low click-through rate.

SEO Analyzer

One of the most useful, and widely used, tools that Bing offers is its SEO analyzer. Bing will provide suggestions to influence your SEO, and provide an analysis of how your SEO is performing on different areas of your site. Bing also ranks certain aspects of SEO at different “severity” levels. If you lack meta descriptions on a certain portion of your site, for example, Bing considers this a severe misstep and shows you exactly what pages need correcting.

Inbound Link Insights

Bing offers a lot of details in this area, making it another useful feature. A general graph shows you the total number of inbound links to your site, which isn’t exactly groundbreaking, but below that, you’ll be able to find information about the pages that link to your site. The information includes anchor text. You can export this information in order to do extended analysis about who’s linking to you and what language they are using to do so.

Malware Alerts

An unfortunately reality of doing business on the web is malware. To help protect against the security issues caused by malware, Bing scans for sites that have been affected. Via Bing analytics, you are alerted if a page on your site is infected with malware. You can directly request Bing review your malware-infected pages in order to quickly resolve the problem.

It may not account for a ton of your web traffic, but quite a few people still use Bing, so if you have the time and mental bandwidth to give it some thought, consider implementing a review of Bing analytics for your business.

Check back in throughout the month of October for more information on how to best use analytics for your local business.

Kayleigh Karutis is  contributor to the Connectivity blog.