Search Around the World - Part One: Asia/Pacific & Australia

Moderator: - Kevin Ryan – Vice President, Global Content Director, Search Engine Strategies and Search Engine Watch. Speakers: - Motoko Hunt – Founder, Japanese Search Marketing Strategist, AJPR LLC - T.R. Harrington – Director of Strategic Direction & Product Development, Darwin Marketing - Erica Schmidt – Global Director of Search, iProspect Motoko Hunt Japanese Internet Market 87.5 million on Internet 68% penetration 50% Broadband mix More access via mobile than pc. Word of mouth marketing is huge in Japan. They believe what they read on blogs so harness that but be careful as to any negative comments that may be posted about your company and react. Social Networking and Gaming is huge on cell phones there. Students are doing all their online activity via cell phones. Yahoo and Google allow you to get search results from all webpages or from Japanese pages only. (check boxes) No need for .jp domain when searching from those two sites. Search Box is getting popular on all advertising including television. Ex. Ad tells you to go to a site and enter a keyword. (My thoughts are that because of the cell phone penetration that keyword marketing keyword use makes total sense and this is why its so big) Language Issues 4 different sets of letters and characters No spaces segmenting the words Spelling variation for words Translation Challenges Not the best message for culture Lose keyword density Ad copies to long or short Use less popular words Different words, spelling, characters sets etc.. Select target keywords – create keywords list, translate english keywords Shopping Payment options – credit card, mobile, wire transfer, net banking, cash on delivery, pay at convenience stores, points (not coupons) Budgets are growing rapidly and companies are bringing more services in-house T.R. Harrington Search inside China Baidu is the market leader in China. Their share in search traffic has increased to 68%. Google has just 23% Revenue Growth U.S. 234 Million in 07 Baidu shows paid search ads before the natural or organic results. For popular words you may not see natural results on page 1 or even page 2. Take that into account when dealing with China. Baidu just released API but the platforms are much different. The china search engine market is very young. Their advertisers need a much more simple interface. There are much fewer options with their search engine marketing because of a lack of education on search engine marketing and internet marketing in general Paid Search - High click-thru rates (assumed; Baidu provides no CTR%) - Faster CPC price increases (largest in the world) (Jan-May 70% in select industries) - Relatively few optimization variables Natural search - Keyword selection methodology - Traffic estimation tools in china unreliable (Google has even recommended not using their tool in China) People in China are willing to open many windows at 1 time when running searches (ex of 8 or so windows). Searchers want something that’s very tangible. Advertisers have very little experience with brand marketing so they aren’t ready to bring their SEM in house as opposed to Japan and Australia. People are still primarily buying offline even though online commerce is growing. Limited data at this time on search. Portals in China do not give out impression data so they don’t sell CPM based on portals. ------------------------------------------------------------- Erica Schmidt Australia’s Uniqueness 2 years behind the US 2007 estimated 67% of population is online Growth rate of broadband has been slower and less availability Google 72% Yahoo 4% Google 17% MSN 4% Google has almost 97% share in Australia Marketers are purely focused on paid search in Australia 72% of the clicks on Google are on the natural search results so SEO is very important in that market. About 40% of spend online is dedicated to search because of such a huge amount of participation. Important Things to Consider Volume, Leverage video content by using YouTube (Video and Maps very new, Understand the market, Social is still new only about 10 to 12% penetration rate, Trust (concern about identity theft – build relationship with customer make them feel safe), Creating Time, Respect cultural distinctions between US and Australia, Don’t leave money on the table in terms of organic search engine optimization. Because of broadband experience the shopping cart is very important because of lower connections speeds. Since trust levels are lower many are using search as an offline mechanism for in store buying. Big opportunity is around Travel because of the amount of Travel that Australians do. Contributed by: Justin Davy is a search engine marketing specialist for the E.W. Scripps Company and a guest writer for SER.