- Baidu, the world’s largest Chinese search engine, announced the opening of a Shanghai research and development center to implement the “Aladdin Plan” in order to identifying the ‘Hidden Web’. The Hidden Web, also know as ‘Deepnet’ or, the ‘Invisible Web’ is content that is not currently indexed by search engines. This area of the [...] - Friendfeed is now available in 6 new languages including Japanese and Chinese. Friendfeed currently works with 59 services including Facebook, Fricker, YouTube and Twitter, and 1/3 of the users are already using it with languages other than English. Facebook and Twitter already have Japanese version and gaining Japanese users, but mixi and Gree are definitely the largest [...] - Since we don’t have Thanksgiving holiday in Japan, we don’t have the Black Friday nor the Cyber Monday. But, on December 7 (OK, it was Sunday), Rakuten had the record sales of more than 3 billion yen in one day, which was 40% up from the same time last year. I guess Japanese market is [...] - ComScore, Inc. just announced top Japan website rankings for the month of October 2008. The ranking information is based on data from the comScore World Metrix audience measurement service. The rankings of the largest and fastest growing Internet properties and site categories in Japan shows that Business/Finance sites saw visitation growth in October due to the [...] - Google recently opened ads to beer and now hard liquor ads will be allowed in January. The liquor advertisers can only buy ads on Google that are directed to the liquor manufacturers site. According to a Google rep in Asia when asked about liquor ads in Asia; ‘Google is only relaxing the policy in countries [...] - The vertical search field in Bulgaria has seen some development in the last 6-12 months and in this post I’ll try to cover the current situation and outline the future trends. Only two years ago virtually no vertical search engines existed in the Bulgarian web. There were some rudimentary attempts at vertical search but they were [...] - Social Networking is a very popular activity in Latin America and Brazil is making a serious point about it. A comScore study involving all countries with more than 10 million internet users revealed that social networks reached 87% of Canadians and 85% of Brazilians during September 2008 (9.3 points increase when compare to last year), taking [...] - There were technical problems related to our live blogging during the recent International Search Summit causing bad formatting in all posts - I apologize for the inconvenience - posts are now "readable" - always consider this was a live blogging :) - 10 DOs and 10 Don'ts when turning to the emerging markets Lesley Richards - Samia Kesseiri of Web Certain Reach your market Keyword research Segmentation and geotargeting Decide on your budget Localize your objectives Media Placement Landing page localization (landing page relevancy - unique sale propositions ...) ... Political factors don't assume everyone purchases online Algerians research online and buy offline In China payment is not with credit card but Cash on delivery Geotargeting is essential in big countries (see Brasil for example) CPC can vary considerably - don't expect to pay less in india than in the UK English is used in B2B - don't think you need to go local always ... - Often there are problems related to effectiveness - can users achieve what they need to Ease of learning Recognition rather than recall error prevention satisfaction all fundamental parameters requiring attention and measurement to benchmark website performance. Search Usability - ease with which users find information on a website. people say a lot about what they want with their keywords - more "pogo sticking" there is less likely are conversions ... - Blending is blurring for search marketers as it adds more complexity - google is using Eniro for local results, Eniro is using search results from Google to complement the local directory. Local services: High quality search traffic transparent network true partnership innovative solutions service = people locally you'll et more value for money buying from the locals ... - 4.8% and Google 75.3% Algorithm and INdex are important and have priority, now using multimap as mapping software Research Investment - Blind Taste Test, a comparison between Live and other search engines to test validity of the results Search behaviours: 3 categories Find, discover, explore - these are highly engaged in their exploring, the most interesting group Farecast - currently all around travel. ... New tools for the adCenter have ben released - adcenter desktop tool now available, this was the N. 1 request of users - designed around office 2007, now in beta availabel to premium clients, now the excel plugin - allows to do research on keywords an keyoword suggestions. adExcellence is the Online Educational Tutorial website to learn all about adCenter (www.adExcellence.com) there is also an adCenter Community (adcentercommunity.com) - So all the metrics about secured pages are pretty much useless in this market. 33% of russians are weekly users about 19 million users - big growth potential There are mainly DSL connections Younger people (12-17) are most active with a peak in Moscow - typical of Russia, Moscow is like a separate country. ...Petersburg, other russian 30% other countries 12% Average price for click: high tech $ 0,31 Consulting $ 0,62 Tourism $ 0,34 B2B $ 0,66 (gowing down along with finance, and education) Yandex offers an English interface but not the best it could be presenting russian where English is not available Yandex offers premium and guaranteed positions - the most intensive way of promoting your site on Yandex search - then there is rotation. - Alex Burmaster - Nielsen Online, European Search Landscape Nielsen Online, what consumers do and consume online, what they say and share online Italy 20% increase in the number of people using search engines, uk +6% Spain +12% People are spending more time in search online +26% Uk + 10% Italy In Sept. 13% of click throughs are paid , 9% (D), 7% (F) 28% CTRs are travel, multi category commerce, 27% home and fashion 25% (this is UK, similar in Germany, a bit on the lower side in France 19%-17%-17%) drilling down Insurance, gifts 6 Flowers, multi-category, loans, free merchandise, credit card, multi-category level, cruise lines, hotels, automotive Secure click throughs: 4.2%(UK) 2.6% (F) 2.1% (D) - a search link will ultimately lead to a secure website Google, Google Images, MSN/WL, ASK, YAHOO! , AOL, Virgilio Ricerca, Viola, Trovit, Google Product are the main engines, in this order Mobile search becoming an increasingly important aspect of search, Italy in head of Europe, UK, F, D, ES - italy a 2.2 million unique mobile internet users Mobile search is a male orientated landscape - roughly 70/30 in Europe, but tends to be closer to a 50/50 split in the UK Age group 35-49 is the biggest group (always for mobile) - Robin Li, CEO of the world’s leading Chinese search engine Baidu, will be the keynote speaker at ad:tech. ad:tech, a global interactive marketing event, will be held in Shanghai, Novermber 25 - 26, 2008 at the Shanghai International Convention and Exhibition Center. Day 2 keynote speakers will be Harry Hui, Chief Marketing Officer of PepsiCo [...] - Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications announced its plan to introduce Japanese Kanji character domain “.日本” or “.日本国” as early as Summer 2009. Currently, Japanese characters can be used as “郵便局.jp”. There are about 1 million “.jp” domains registered and about 140,000 of them use Japanese characters. No Tags - Google Analytics is now available in Portuguese. Google Analytics is a widely used web analytics tool, provided for free by Google and already used by many webmasters in Portugal. In October, Google had already announced that Google Sites - a tool for creating free sites online - was also available in the Portuguese language. google analytics - Accoona, a b2b search engine, was recently acquired by the Masterseek, a global business search engine. “Masterseek is a virtual showroom to search out business information about others and to guide and update the information available on your own company.” Accoona launched in 2004 with great fanfare including having former US President Bill [...] - comScore, Inc. released a study of music related sites in Japan. It shows that nearly 40% of the Japanese online population visited an entertainment music site such as iTunes in the month of August in 2008. The study also revealed that Japan recorded the highest penetration of users of Apple iTunes software during the month, [...] - Baidu, the world’s leading Chinese search engine, officially launched their consumer to consumer e-commerce platform “Youa”. Baidu has their own branded online payment system called BaiFuBao, to make purchases on Youa. Youa was previously available to 10,000 pre-approved sellers and 50,000 participants in closed beta testing. Youa will compete with current C2C marketplace leader Alibaba’s [...] |