Digital Learner: July 2011

Tuesday 12 July 2011

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.

Monday 11 July 2011

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

Sunday 10 July 2011

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.