Danny Sullivan preps the panel, big panel, big panel.
Gonzalo Alonso from Google Mexico up first. Trends in Latin America is that it is not that different from what we saw in the US. Search is pervasive in Latin America (same slide from the session right before this). Internet users search to learn more about product and services (70% brazil, 74% mexico), compare prices (66% brazil, 61% mexico), more stats but too quick to write down. Search marketing in Latin America is poisded to grow, $111M in 2005 and $337 in 2009, expected to triple in size in four years. Google is the number one property by page views, number two property by reach, number one property in search and number one property in online communities with orkut. 78% of search pageviews take place in Google, 84% in argentina, 88% chile, etc. He goes over basic AdWords information, where the ads show, how the ads are shown and some AdSense. Google reaches 80% of the Internet population worldwide. He shows a video of how AdWords is helping in Latin America, docid=2258046021913351677 title is Corpo Perfecito (Grupo Galgrin) e Google AdWords em Brasil (2 minute and 16 second video, posted on Feb. 22, 2006). You can see on the face of Gonzalo that the video means a lot to him, he cares.
Guilherne Gibenboim from Yahoo!, wow Danny pronounced it, he has a thick accent, I think he is from Brazil. Latam Market, there are many types of businesses on YSM but they generally fall into 4 basic types in Latam. (1) Internet pure players (2) SEMs (3) Agencies and (4) Small & Medium Businesses. Advertisers main challenge, to pinpoint relevant searchers in Latam. How are users searching? Over 500M keywords generated in YSM Latin America per year. Most successful advertisers own between 1k-50k keywords in Brazil. The buying cycle: The user can search to be informed, to shop or to purchase. Planning your customer experience: segmentation is the key to planning your customer experience. Tracking conversions: It is important to consider the factors that drive conversions. YSM's goal is to help advertisers to pinpoint relevant searchers.
Maria Teresa Arnal from Prodigy MSN. Leading online destination in Mexico with over 17M users per month. #3 player in market with 40% reach, 8M users and 100M search queries per month. It's only the beginning: VIsion of Search" deliver answers not just links, answer complex questions, understand and anticipate user intent, broaden search beyond the web and provide a seamless experience no matter where data resides, and put the user in control and deliver a personalized search experience. They are investing heavily in relevance, leadership, local and enterprise. They want to go beyond web search. MSN Search V1, start.com, livelabs, academic search, etc. Prodigy MSN User Behavior; single words are the main way users search for results, 64% of the queries are text link results while 36% are image results, users peak time to search is between 10am and 4pm and queries drop 50% on weekends. Prodigy MSN Portal 28%, Search Portal 39%, Hotmail 1%, Messenger 7%, and other (IE, Encarta, etc.) 24%. What can advertisers do with Prodigy MSN in Mexico? She shows sponsored search (advertising.prodigy.msn.com), Prodigy MSN will offer a unique opp for advertisers targeting Mexican internet users; they are partnering with players in Mexico, etc. She talks about adCenter, serving 100% of paid search listings in France, Singapore, US and UK (autumn 2006). Advertisers more strategically plan their online buys. Real audience intelligence and targeting capabilities. Available for SPanish speaking markets in 2007. She shows search funnels, search result clustering, and forecasting search volume functionality (we discussed them here in the past).
Erica Schmidt (not Eric Schmidt, EricA) from iProspect. Latin America GDP 2003 shows Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile, Peru are the largest, in that area. Erica will focus on the top five. She took a snapshot view of Internet usage online worldwide by country; US, then China, then Japan, Brazil is number 11 (March 2006, ComScore). Broadband subscriber growth in Latin America to grow 70.7% according to eMarketer, May 2006. Search Marketplace: Google leads in search queries worldwide with 39.5%, Yahoo 18.3%, 8.6% Google UK. Brazil Google has 55.8%, MSN has 30.2% and Yahoo! 11.9% (May 2006). Mexico; Google 74.9%, 17.2% Yahoo, Prodigy MSN 1.6% share. Argentina, Google 80.7%, and Colombia 87% and Chile is 93% Google market share (huge). Key Languages: Spanish, French, Portuguese (Brazil). Radio Button Usage (you know clicking on Google.com versus Google.co.mx, etc. or search pages only in Spanish or search on pages in Mexico). Most users do not click on those radio buttons! Search engines "pre-empt" search results with content from within these tabs. Users don't utilize the "radio buttons." She explains the geo-filters placed automatically when searching in US versus anywhere else. Mega trends among all the engines; local, blogs, personalization, offline convergence, mobile and no more spam.
Marcel Sant'Iago from the IAB Brazil. He will give us stats from numbers generated within Brazil. More than 10M internet users, 12M from home, with a population of 180M. 78% of users belong to AB class. 40% of active users use broadband, 95% of IRS tax forms are submitted online, 500,000+ .com.br domains. Online ad revenue in 2005 is $111M US. 15-20% of online media investments, local search is not available, local publishing providing contextual inventory, big marketers coming in, retail still lead paid placement. Opportunities: CPCs are still low compared to US and Europe, most categories have few ads, broad reach of search engines. Internet activities; email 17%, school activities 11.5%, search for products (too quick), he broke down search specific search also. The Challenge; language, they have three names for Tangerine in Portuguese.
Disclaimer: I type as fast as I can, there are grammar errors, typos and more issues with this. I do my best to be as accurate as possible. But due to the nature of "real time" coverage, there will be issues.
