Yahoo Japan Sponsored Search ver 3 Part 1

Yahoo! Japan has recently migrated to a new platform in November 2011. I’ve decided to wait over a month to use the new system & write a review of it. Truthfully there are not too many nonJapanese in the SEM industry in Japan compared to roles in advertising. This is one of the main reasons why there isn’t a lot of information that a migration even took place.

Background on the migration:
Yahoo Inc (US) and Yahoo! Japan are two separate companies that share the same branding. Yahoo is not number one in the US but Yahoo! Japan is top dog in Japan. Yahoo! Japan and it’s parent company Softbank also has vast investments in plenty of Japan tech companies. Over two years when it was announced that Yahoo Search would get bought by Microsoft & powered by Bing’s ad platform AdCenter.

At that point Yahoo! Japan was utilizing Yahoo Inc’s Panama platform without much bells & whistles. I can list quite a few issues that we had with the old Panama Platfom.

1. The time was set in concrete to US time. That means that your daily spend would actually end at like 5pm Japan time & reset after that. This made no sense to any of us.

2. Reports were very limited. The platform had like 3 useful reports. Keyword reports, daily reports, & Campaign reports. Other than the keyword report there wasn’t an option to get average positions. There wasn’t a Query report.

3. No Dayparting

4. There was an option to block sites but no option to pull data to see the various sites your ads were being served on.

5. Maintenance was done a few times during our work day but in the night in the US.

6. Reporting access didn’t really exist. You gave access to the whole account.

7. Importing had to be done in one format in excel. You’d beat yourself silly doing an upload till you figure this one out.

Although the system was bad Yahoo! Japan does have a top notch sales staff working for them. While Yahoo! Japan needed many changes to have a better system it just seemed like Yahoo Inc didn’t feel the need to make the system more efficient for Japan. Yahoo! Japan leases the technology from Yahoo Inc.

Yahoo! Japan has a steady growth in Japan & it very profitable. Microsoft’s AdCenter was at that point in time not utilized in any Asia Pacific country. This basically means it was untested in any double byte language territory. At that point I believed that they had two options.

Build their own or use Microsoft’s AdCenter. Building their own was something that I believe Yahoo! Japan has already started to do but with the timing I don’t think a sufficent system could be finished in time. The other option was to use AdCenter. I believe most would think that Bing is in Japan so AdCenter is not truly untested in Asia. Well Bing Japan gets it’s ads from Yahoo! Japan. It doesn’t serve ads from AdCenter either.

What happened next?

Find out in our next post…