Paid Search

Global PPC: How to Get Started in Countries Beyond Your Borders Anne Kennedy , Beyond Ink USA - May 31, 2011

With more than 80 percent of the world's Internet population outside the US, you may be tempted to expand your search marketing with pay-per-click advertising in other countries. The Internet has erased borders and made geography irrelevant in many ways, easing the flow of information from one people to another. Just as the recent political unrest in Northern Africa was facilitated by the ease of sharing information online,so it has become harder to make clear delineations between domestic and international markets in online commerce. Marketers from outside the US are likely to compete on your home turf, and you can just as certainly find opportunities in markets outside the US.

In most of the world, Google is the dominant search engine, except in China, Russia and South Korea, which we'll discuss shortly. In Japan Yahoo! is the most popular, but is adopting Google search to drive results. Starting a PPC campaign in Google dominated markets is fairly straightforward from within your AdWords account, where you create separate campaigns for different countries. With Google's dominant hold on market share, the tools and interfaces you already know -- AdWords, Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools -- should prove convenient support to successfully implement a PPC campaign.

Sound easy? Not so fast . . .

Challenges

Familiar tools and technology are the least of what you need to attract future customers in foreign markets. You need to know how to speak to them in their own language, and equally important, understand what appeals to them. Good marketing practice means you need to consider the differences among customers in different cultures, some obvious and some more nuanced, if you want your advertising to be effective. Landing pages, too, need to speak to potential customers in their own languages, and if you are selling products online, even your shopping cart and the methods of payment you offer need to be familiar to each culture.

Translations and Keyword Research

Your keyword research is the most important element. To find foreign language keywords, you could start with Google Trends and the Google keyword tool for research. To understand budgets you can run keywords through Google Translate, but that probably won't show you slang or other phrases in common use. For example, in German the direct translation for "cell phone" is "mobil telfon," but far more Germans call it a "handy." In Brazil, "Telemóvel" has a small fraction of the searches the term "Celular" does, which you'll note, though adapted from the US term "cellular," is spelled differently.

Google Translate is a useful tool for deciphering instructions and navigating content on some non-English websites, but it is not a good choice for translating keywords, text for your ads or content for your landing pages. For these critical communications to your potential customers, you are best finding a native speaker who is familiar with local customs and manner of speech.

International Payments

For payments, If you are contemplating a search advertising campaign in another country, you need to know whether the credit card system we are accustomed to is popular. It's not the norm everywhere. Nor is PayPal. The Dutch prefer their own payment system, iDeal, set up by a consortium of banks. Mexican online shoppers like their pre-paid Todito card. The French, Germans, and British are all comfortable using bank cards and PayPal for online purchase, but the Italians are very cautious about using credit cards online, and will often use PayPal instead.

In the few countries where market share for Google and Yahoo! is small, you can use your AdWords account to target searchers there also. However, in those countries -- Russia, China and South Korea -- the lion's share of search traffic goes to local favorites. Let's take a look at how the biggest work -- Yandex, Baidu and Naver.

Yandex in Russia

Yandex (short for "yet another indexer") is Russia's largest search engine, with roughly three times the market share of Google. Yandex has worked hard for 20 years to develop search in the Cyrillic alphabet for the RuNet -- more than 40 million Russian language Internet users, including those in Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakstan. In Russia, Yandex is the leading online destination, with nearly 11 billion page views per month.

In 2010, the Yandex homepage attracted a monthly average of 21.5 million searchers and processed about 100 million search queries daily, 25.9 million of those by searchers in in Moscow, but more important, these were among more than 53 million users from all over the world. Yandex wants your business, opening a US office last year in the Boston area to attract US online commerce to serve searchers in Russia.

On the business side, Yandex also launched a $1.3 billion IPO May 24, 2011 on NASDAQ. Clearly, they intend to stay in the game.

Yandex services PPC advertisers on Yandex Direct, which will look quite familiar if you have advertised using Google AdWords or Bing AdCenter. To find your keywords, you can check the estimated search volume for any keywords/phrases in any region using Yandex Wordstat. It provides keywords suggestions together with monthly search volumes.

Yandex Direct is where you can place pay-per-click ads in Yandex search results pages. http://direct.yandex.com

Like Google, Yandex offers several types of placements and several types of targeting, as well as exact match and phrase match . The variety of placements offered include: Yandex Search, partner search sites such as. Bing.ru, Yandex advertising network, and catalogue and market pages. You will find a lot of detailed information at the Yandex Direct Help site. (http://help.yandex.com/direct)

Yandex pay-per-click advertising provides premium placements and standard ones.

Their targeting options are very much the same as Google's, including contextual ads triggered by keywords, geographic targeting as specific as by city level, thematic by keyword, time targeting for day-parting and behavioural targeting based on Yandex registration information.

Yandex also provides a contextual advertising service similar to Google AdSense. According to comScore (February 2011), with the audience reach of 87.6%, Yandex had the biggest advertising network on the Russian market. Yandex says participation of the sites in their advertising network helps expand audience reach, and increase amount of impressions and clicks they provide to advertisers.

PPC in China

There are only two options for PPC in China: the native search engine Baidu, which ComScore named the world's second largest search engine, and Google. With Google pulling out of mainland China and serving "only" Hong Kong, reaching Chinese searchers is more difficult. Plan on either using both search engines, or if only one, choose Baidu.

Baidu shows its PPC results in very similar way as Google

Getting PPC advertising up and running in Baidu has become easier over the past years, but you still need a good understanding of Chinese. It's best that your team or search marketing agency can read and input Chinese. You set up your account on Baidu's advertiser website https://cas.baidu.com/ . If you don't speak Chinese, you can work with Baidu directly through their international support site http://is.baidu.com/paidsearch.html.

Even with Baidu International Support, if you do not have Chinese language capabilities, you should partner with agencies that have worked in China before and understand the market. This is so important when you are launching your first campaign and have no experience with this complex market. Understanding of China's culture and languages is vital for the success of your online visibility there.

South Korea

In South Korea Naver is the dominant search engine and together with second place Daum claims 90 percent of the South Korean market. Nate is in third place at 9 percent, and Google trailing.

Naver is the most popular search engine in South Korea

Yahoo! Korea's Overture is the most effective entry for PPC by foreigners in Korea, as they partner with both Naver and Nate and show ads on Yahoo! Korea, Paran, MSN, HanaFos and DreamWiz, among others. Overture Korea (Yahoo!) provides sponsored link results displayed on the top of their partner result pages. Even so, opportunities for PPC for businesses based outside Korea are limited, Naver displays one Yahoo!/Overture ad per page, and Daum two, among up to 50 other ads on each. To place more ads on Naver your business has to be located in South Korea.

Though Google has only a five percent share, it is another point of entry to the Korean online ad market, as the Google display network has access to Daum, Empas and Enuri.

Naver's own PPC service is called Click Choice. Ads bought through that service are only shown on Naver. Like Naver, Daum has its own service called Clix. Daum ads are only shown on their results pages, followed by Google's sponsored links.

Naver's page for marketers does not provide much help for those that do not speak Korean.

If you want to market through Naver's Power Links the URL: http://searchad.naver.com may help, but you will need to read and understand Korean to manage it, and it's anything but self-service for foreigners. For assistance, contact Naver via the nbp-corp.com page (or e-mail nbpinfo@nhn.com).

Tips for Starting Foreign PPC

1. Do your homework on language and culture in the country you are targeting, as well as online shopping habits and payment methods. Tailor your ad text and landing pages to cultural norms in each market.
2. Get a native speaker to help you with language and cultural nuances.
3. Where Google is dominant (most of the world), geo-target new markets from within your AdWords account.
4. In Russia, China, and South Korea, the leading search engines are Yandex, Baidu and Naver, respectively. Learn how to work with each if these markets are on your radar.

Anne F. Kennedy, is an international search strategist, and the found of US-based Beyond Ink USA, with international partners in Iceland, China, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and the UK. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Search Engine Strategies Conferences. Clients have included hundreds of companies, both large and small.

Anne F. Kennedy, is an international search strategist, and the found of US-based Beyond Ink USA, with international partners in Iceland, China, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and the UK. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Search Engine Strategies Conferences. Clients have included hundreds of companies, both large and small.