Korea Social Network Status

FYI
Source from NATE.COM

Naver Search ads - Things you need to consider

Naver Search advertisement - Things you need to consider before you run a campaign/ during the campaign.


To be honest, Naver is real headache search engine (actually it is not search engine to be specific) to handle.
Why?
Few reasons.


1. You cannot delete the keywords in bulk.
You only can delete 50 keywords at a time after click few button to find from the engine to filter/ find what you want to delete. If you want to delete 1,000 keywords, you need to do this 20 times. 
2. Manual account set up
If you want to do content / search targeted ads, you should go to each ad groups and set up one by one.
3. There is no campaign.
There is no campaign there is an account for each client.
And in there, there are ad groups. So basically you will have account and ad groups.


I don't want to fill up my blog with my complaints and prehistoric system's absurdity. So let me go back to the topic which is more useful.


Things you need to know when you create Naver Search account.
Because they never tell you early and tell you always last minute.
So you would better know all that stuff to maintain your calmness even though you face some urgent stuff requested by them.
1. business license
When you want to open an account in Naver.
This is what they will ask you first, business license!
The business license should be issued in 3months time from the day you apply your account.


If your client is in Korea, you can advise them to use this site to issue it easily.
사업자등록증은 국세청(www.hometax.go.kr)에서 인터넷 발급가능


2. Change the domain/ landing page means you are applying a new/ additional account.
Which means it will be taking minimum 3 days to use new URL. (Just think that it will be taking 1 week as they are not that fast unless you spend around 30,000,000 KRW every month. (not exact figure in terms of the amount.)


3. Keywords review takes half day average.
Usually all depends on the people who review your keywords, it varies.
They sometimes takes 3 hours and sometimes half day.
To be safe, you plan accordingly for your target launch date.

Is it possible to do SEO in Naver?

Is it possible to do SEO in Naver?

To give you the answer first, it is 'No'.

Naver blocks the crawling of the bots.

So to speak, Naver block nobody can crawl any of their data.

Naver doesn't allow anyone to access their data but they do lots of crawling from other sites. The example is Naver bot, Yeti.

Therefore it is not possible to do SEO in Naver.

Anyone who owns the site and want to do SEO, you should allow the bot to access to your site.

Please see the image below, this is what Naver did to block the Naver's crawling.

The contents which includes robots.txt in the route of your website, if you enter this,

User-agent:*

Disallow:/

They block the access of those bot.

Do Daum and Nate have their own ad platforms? Can you briefly describe how they are similar/ different from Naver?

Yes, they do have their own SEM platform.

That is called "Daum Clicks" which has launched since 1st June 2011. Through this platform, you can do SEM in Daum along with Nate and Yahoo altogether at the same time.

This platform is running in CPC pricing model and as you can see from the image below. It will be the second section in the search result page.

Naver is solely running the SEM program by themselves from 2011 Jan without Overutre's sponsor link section. So if you use Naver's platform, your ads will be shown right under the search box.

Can you share 3-5 tips/ advice on how to use Naver’s advertising platform since it moved out of Yahoo Overture?

1)    Search product: Naver has 6 different type of search product in their only one site. (Power link, biz site, SE search, Mobile search, search sections except integrated search, and search partners). You can buy only one section out of these six.

2)    Contents partners: Naver is trying to have more partners to cover larger audiences other than their site but still they have only 7 partners and most of them are not really related to your business. You should think one more time if you want to set up content match in Naver

3)    Naver doesn’t have CPM but CPT. You need to participate every Wednesday bidding auction for that. But it’s much cheaper than CPC buys.

4)    With minimum 950 USD you can have video and multiple link in the search result page. If you have high enough impressions for your brand, this is recommendable option. Please see example below.

Korean search portals have become more social in recent years; can you explain how that would impact SEO/ SEM strategies?

According to KISA (Korea Internet & Security Agency), 61.3% of users from the age 12 to 49 Koreans are using SNS at least once a month. In 2010, social networks are covering the highest volume of impression of the online banner ads. 

Still social contents are not yet fully mature in Korea; it is much cheaper and easier to build trust through active engagement with potential customer. Don’t forget the ‘Law of Mind; from the book, the immutable law of marketing that it is better to be first than selling a better product. Social is part of SEM now in Korea market as they are in the same page of Search result page.

What factors should I consider if I’m doing an SEM campaign in Korea?

Mainly 5 factors you need you consider when we do SEM targeting Korea.

1)    SEM Planning

-Korean local engines are relatively expensive. Accordingly budget should be allocated. To know the average CPC per keyword, you should have NHN Business platform ID& PW.

-They do have conversion code like Google conversion tracking code. If client allows, we should use them as they don’t provide API for SEM which means it is not easy to use omniture search centre, Marin or Kenshoo.

2)    Where are the target audiences are

You have 3 options of sites. Depending on the audience’s profile you target, you should choose Google, Naver or Overture considering that which will work the best for your marketing plan. Each site has different characteristics. For example, English keywords are searched more by people who use google.co.kr. Naver is strong in Korean language (English searches are getting higher and higher but not yet there.) and covers majority of Koreans as a top local site. Overture covers Daum, Nate and many other sites. So if you want to do SEM in any other engines all together, overture will be a good option. Each site has different demographic in terms of age, so accordingly you should choose.

3)    Account set-up

-We should consider that an account set-up process would be different. For example like Naver, you should send ‘Business license’ and ‘media fee’ to them first. They don’t have invoice based payment but do have credit card payment.

Overture is lesser complicated than Naver but still it will take longer and different compared to Google.

-The number of keywords are ad groups are limited per one business certificate.

4)    Local engines have  CPC and CPT buy

5)    Google is not the least option

How are these search engines in Korea different from Google/ Yahoo?

(source of the image is http://digitallearner.blogspot.com/)

In Korea, Google and Naver are compared quite often from a point of view that they are the world and local top search based site respectively. But personally I think that the service operation and corporate management are considerably different. The two companies are showing significant differences from the philosophy. The difference in between the philosophy brings about the difference in technology and this leads the distinction in corporation culture and service. (Compared to Google, this is the reason for Naver receiving relatively more blame on the difference in the philosophy of the two companies will start.)

Let's see their business models. Goal for Naver is to maximize the users time spend in the site. The longer they stay the more number of pages they will see and the ad revenue would grow. In order to do this, Naver is trying hard to make people stay in their site even for the users who come for just searching things and find information. The Naver who took the medal of Korea's top site over from Daum because of the search service, Jisikin is now changing to much more like and total service portal site as they have to make users to stay in their site with more information and attractive contents in the site. This is why the home page of Naver is getting more and more complicated. To hold the users longer in the site, they accumulate the information in their own site and provide them. Because of the overflowing information, users start to wander in the site forgetting the original objective initially why they have visit the site. (As a joke, Koreans say that they visit Naver site when they are boring as they provides abundant interesting information they can enjoy forgetting how the time passes.)

Unlike Naver, objective of Google is making people to leave as soon as possible by providing the most relevant and accurate information quickly. They consider it is a failure if the user stays in their site for long as for them it means they are not getting good enough answer to their queries. The shorter time users spend in the Google site, they might have lesser chance to expose their ads and would reduce the ad profit. But users will visit again as they find what they want only from Google quickly and easily. By doing so, it will increase the frequency of the user's visit to their site and alternatively it will return the revenue. That is why unlike Naver, home page of Google is still has only one search box. It will be very influential if Google allows advertisers to use their main page but that will be a interference of user's search activities and they will lose trust from the users. Google is aware of that this will affect them negatively in the long term perspective. Consequently without home page banner an ad, Google is growing fast enough as a world top a medium of advertisement online.

Do you know how many keywords can be used in Naver?

Do you know how many keywords can be used in Naver?

 Google has a limit in the number of campaigns, keywords and so on.

But at the same time I can say it is limitless because it cannot be more than what they restricted.  ( Also it can be inefficient if it is more than that.)

These are the limits for an AdWords account:

• 500 campaigns (includes active and paused campaigns)
• 20,000 ad groups per campaign
• 5,000 keywords per ad group
• 300 display ads per ad group (includes image ads)
• 50 text ads per ad group
• 3 million keywords per account
• 10,000 location targets (targeted and excluded) per campaign, including up to 500 proximity targets per campaign*

http://support.google.com/adwords/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40907

2,000 (keywords ) x 2,000 ad groups x 100 campaigns = total 400,000,000 keywords you can use for 1 account.

Have you heard of limitless? This is the limit of the limitless definitely.

Naver has a limit. That is the limit which makes many keyword advertisers’ life miserable including me.

We only can use 100,000 keywords. (100 ad groups per account).

And you will have only one account as you have only one business licence or one domain for your business in most of cases. (You can open Naver keywords account upon the business licence.)

Oh, I should not forget very interesting regulation of them. Actually you can have more keywords if you spend more than 10,000,000 KRW per month.  In real sense they showed me and opened my eye to the world that ‘Money talks’.

If nave is a person I can say it is a person who is petty and crafty. Only can see what they have in front of their eyes. That’s why there is a limitation in such way.  Shameful to say they are the representative site of Korea. I look into the online universe for new stars to come soon.

The difference and similarities between Naver, Daum and Nate.

(Since there is abundance of information about those three main portals, I would answer specifically from a search-ads' marketer view.)

 To explain the similarities and differences of those 3 major sites in Korea, I need to start up with Daum because the most active online stream starts from there. Daum is the first portal which owned the most number of email users (so called hanmail) and online communities called cafe in Korea from 1995. Naver only started their service in 1999 and in every way they were the follower in the industry. Naver was 2 years late in providing email service and 4 years late in community service. Only for the search services are provided by both engines in same year in 2000. All the while Daum has been a dominant portal in Korea.  In 2002, Daum presented a new featured email service, at the same time Naver came up with a feature added search service called Jisikin (Knowledge in). In early days of the internet era in Korea, internet was used mainly for sending emails, chatting and being connected with people online via communities. Search services were there in any other portals but it was not well used. When Jisikin service was newly launched and people start to realize how they can use online service better as an search engine. Jisikin was the service is the sole feature Naver provides which differentiated Naver from others and it led Naver’s success. (Daum provides the search service as well in very featureless way.) Naver has been the number one portal site in Korea for last few years in terms of market share, the number of page views and unique visitors. Now Naver has the upper hand even in the number of users of Naver communities and email services. In Sep 2009, Nate launched semantic search as part of an effort to increase their market share and it helped them to increase their market share to 10% now.

 Interestingly enough, those three sites have similar home page UI. They all have log-in section either left or right side along with news and shopping sections. This home page structure has a thread of connection that those are not search engines but portals. At the same time, they are competing each other to be used by site visitors as a search engine. From 1995 to early of 2000, Daum was the top portal site in Korea, this is changed only because Naver started promote their Jisikin service

Do you know Naver also has keyword insertion function?

Yes, they do have!
but it's not the format we use in Google , {KEYWORD:ABC} but this is the one <키워드:ABC>.

키워드 = keyword

Once you use this, in the result page the keyword will be displayed in bold.

I marked in red for the bold characters in the ad copy.
It means the advertiser is using the Dynamic keyword insertion function.

Overture Partners in Korea

It is important to know the most updated list of overture search partners

because via Overture, you can cover many Korean local sites when planning SEM.

Since 2011 Jan 1, Naver is not partnering with Overture any more

but still Overture is covering top 2 and 3rd local sites in Korea. 

Source: http://www.overture.co.kr/09_introduction/introduction_3.php

Top 20 Site in Korea (duration of the data :2011/06/09 - 2011/07/07 )

Click the image to see the full picture :)

2011 June Korea Site Rank

Click the image to see the full picture 

(If you can't see the table, please send me a mail, seungaforever@gmail.com)

Source : www.koreanclick.com

Google MCC

Google MCC란 무엇일까요?

사실 한국마켓을 보자면Google MCC가 궁금하신 분들이 과연 몇이나 될까 싶지만…
우선 MCC어카운트가 필요한 사람은 누구일까요? (MCC = MyClientCenter)

Client managers들인데요. 예를 들면

1.     Agencies

2.     Search engine marketers

3.     Automated bid managers

MCC는 여러 개의 계정(어카운트)를 관리하기 쉽게 해줄 뿐만 아니라 “dashboard”라는 feature를 통해서 모든 계정에서 일어나는 일 들 중 당장 당신이 체크해야 할 alert이 필요한 중요한 사안을 한번에 첫 페이지에서 보여줍니다.

로그인을 하게 되면 보이는 페이지는 아래와 같습니다. 이 부분 보시면 tab이 두 가지인데 하나는 budget 또 다른 하나는 performance 이는 top-level view of key stats 보여줌.
Performance에 보면 click, imp, CTR, Conversions, conversion rate, amount spent등이 확인 가능.
Display vs search CTR 을 따로 보여줌으로  placement에 따른 성과를 구분 가능.

Budget을 보시면 셋팅된 budget 쓴돈 % 남은 돈 얼마 광고 시작일과 종료일이 나오는데 지금 이 광고를 관리하는 manager는 이를 셋팅하지 않았음을 확인할 수 있고 이 부분은 잘못 되었다고 볼 수 있다. 정확한 budget을 광고기간 동안  셋팅함으로 overspend or under spend을 방지할 수 있는 굉장히 중요한 part이기 때문에 하기 광고 계정 설정은 budget파트가 빠져 있음으로 수정되어야 한다. 

Alert message는 다음과 같이 생겼다.

MCC를 쓰면 좋은 점

1.     AdWords어카운트에  link되어있는 모든 계정을 한번에 볼 수 있다. 다른 MCC도 연결 가능하고.

2.     전체적인 내 계정들이 안전하게 잘 돌아가고 있는지 top level view를 가질 수 있다.

3.     1개의 로그인만으로도 많은 계정들을 돌아다닐수 있다. (모든 계정은 각각의 ID& PW를 가진다.)

4.     여러 개의 계정의  리포트를 한 곳에서 뽑을 수 있다. ACCOUNT REPORT라고 한다. 아니면 보이는 dash board자체도 다운 로드 가능.

5.     Automated message를 통해서 클라이언트 초청하여 관리 가능

6.     새로운 계정을 열 때 MC에 귀속 되게 하면 생성과 동시 자동 연결.

7.     클라이언트 별 개별 billing생성가능.

Client managers 변경하고 싶을 때,
우선 MCC 제일 상위 레벨에서 로그인을 한 상태에서 최상위MCC안에는 그 밑에 딸린 MCC도 있을 것이고 그냥 그 보다 하위 단계인 account 자체도 있을 것이다. 이 모든 것들을 최상위 MCC로 로그인한 상태에서 진두 지휘가 가능하다.
다시 말해서, 최상위 MCC = 다른 MCC 1 + 또 다른 MCC2 + 보통 Account 1 + 보통 account 2 …이렇게 계속 이어질 수 있다.
만약에 MCC나 아니면 그냥 보통 account를 API-only access 를 통해 이동하려면 구글을 contact해야 한다.
어떤 MDS (manager-defined spend) 에 해당하는 어카운트를 다른 MCC로 옮기는 경우 이 둘의 MDO가 같으면 문제가 없지만 그렇지 않은 경우 광고는 30분만에 모두 중지될 것이다. 광고는 new client manager를 생성함으로서 재개될 것이다.
예를 들어서

1)     MDO가 최상위 MCC에 적용이 되어 있는데 이 최상위 MCC는 두 개의 하위 MCC를 포함한다. 내가 만약에 sub-MCC1을 sub-MCC2로 옮긴다면 광고는 계속 진행된다 왜냐면 두 개의 MCC는 여전히 같은 MDO의 관할 아래 놓여 있으니까요 ^_^

2)     또 다른 예시: 이번에도 최상위 MCC에 sub-level MCCs 2개가 있어요. 그런데 각각의 MCC가 고유한 다른 MDO밑에 있답니다. 이제 이해하셨겠지만 이 경우 sub-MCC1에서 sub-MCC2로 옮기시면 sub-MCC1은 광고가 중지 됩니다.  광고 재개를 위해서 new budget 을 생성하셔야 해요.

그럼 계속적으로 언급한 MDO ( Manager Defined Spend) 가 뭔지 이제 알아봅시다.
MDS는 MCC사용자를 위한 간단한 광고계정의 버젯관리 방법입니다.
그 이유를 보자면 여러 개의 광고 계정들의 budget을 한번에 수정이나 관리하고 싶다면 MCC메인의 dashboard에서 한번에 처리 할수 있기도 하고Manager-Order-level의 매달 인보이스를 통해서  빌링을 처리할 수도 있기 때문입니다.
MDS를 만들고 싶으면 계정이 INVOICE를 생성하여 Billing(월별 인보이스) 을 하는 계정이던가 신용카드 결재 (신용카드 후불결제인 계정) , direct debit (자동이체) 또는 새로운 계정 (신규계정) 인 경우 가능합니다. 즉, 선불 계정이거나 클라이언트한테 billing이 구글로부터 직 발송되는 경우에는 MCC자체가 될 수 없으므로 이 모든 경우 MDS가 될 수 없겠죠.
자, 이제 그럼 MDS를 어떻게 셋팅하고 관리하는지를 살펴보도록 해요 ^_^

1.     어떤 어카운트를 MDS로 관리하고 싶은지 결정을 합시다.

2.     구글Finance team이 내가 관리하는 MCC가 MDS가 될 수 있는지를 살펴볼 거예요.  이 부분이 승인이 나면  MDO 셋업을 합니다. (Manager Defined Order = MOD =그러니까 말 그대로 내가 정하는 만큼 쓰기 )

3.     승인이 난 이후에는 service agreement를 받고 review – sign- return the signed copy하시면 되요. 국가별로 다른데 싱가폴은 service agreement가 URL을 포함해서 URL에서 들어가서 읽고 PIN Code넣으면 승인이 되며 sign 해서 hard copy 공유할 필요가 없습니다.

4.     구글이 MDO가 MCC에 적용이 되면 알려줄 거예요.

5.     이제부터는 관리하는 캠페인에 budget을 생성할 수 있어요.

6.     앞으로는 매월 말 MDS (Manager Defined Spend) 관리 계정에 대한 MDO (Managed Defined order) 단위 invoice가 발송됩니다. 해당 인보이스는 cheque나 wire transfer(송금)로 결제할 수 있답니다. MCC계정에서 결제요약 페이지에서 PDF다운로드도 가능하죠.

MCC를 사용하다 보면 몇 가지 문제들이 발생하기도 하는데요.
이를 해결하기 위한 방법으로는 하위 MCC계정을 이용하여 일부 계정에 대한 권한을 일임할 때 모든 계정을 노출시키지 않아도 되구요.  고객 계정을 차후에 이동해야 할 일이 생기면 고객 계정을 다른 하위 MCC로 이동하도록 고객관리자 변경기능을 사용하면 됩니다.
추가 고객 계정 및 하위 MCC만들어야 하는 경우 고유한 이메일 주소 (무료 메일서비스들 지메일이나 야후메일이나…) 사용하셔서 계정당 한 개의  로그인을 만드세요.
MCC admin만이 MCC나 child account 의 access level을 변경할 수 있다는 것을 잊지 마세요! J