International SEM

Yahoo Japan’s Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool stops updating stats

July 26, 2011 By Craig 9ine

Who said the Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool was dead?

Yahoo’s Japan’s Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool has stopped updating stats finally it seems. Now I know quite a few of you are thinking this must be an old post or something that was just reposted from 2007. No it’s currently 2011 & Obama is the president of the USA. There has been actually several Keyword Suggestion Tools since the public & overused Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool vanished around 2007 but it seems no one writes about them.

The old Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool was pretty much a staple for too many marketing tools. If the tools were used for advertising that would have been fine but many of the softwares using the tool wasn’t geared towards paid search. It was used as an SEO tool and also benchmarks for domain stats.

In 2007 Yahoo launched the first new Keyword Suggestion Tool as they promised when they shut down the old one. Everyone was happy to hear that, business as usual right? Wrong. The first tool was agency only. Each person who used it had their own individual logins. Also there was never any press release on it. Agencies used it & kept quiet. Why not? This is the tool that finally is not being updated anymore.

So I know you’re wonder how do agencies get their data now? Well that tool to us was “So last year”. We already have a new tool by Yahoo! Japan. This tool also is schedule to be updated tremendously in Fall 2011. You want to know more about this tool?

Keep reading InternationalSEM.com from time to time I’ll tell you all about it.

Filed Under: Featured, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: Keyword Suggestion Tool, Overture Tool, Yahoo Japan

Global Clients & Dollar Advertising Budgets

July 25, 2011 By Craig 9ine

Global Clients & Dollar Advertising Budgets

Many of us are onlookers as the US Dollar is steadily decreasing in value. Even though many who read this blog reside in countries that have a primary currency other than the US dollar many of our readers have global clients that do allocate budgets in dollar.

The Dollar Yen value

With the fluctuation between currencies on the outside it looks simple. You get a budget in Dollar, you agree on an exchange rate & you bill the client that amount. Seems simple, but it’s not.

4 years ago the fluctuations started to cause concerns for us in Tokyo. The yen has steadily grown stronger & stronger in value. Using an example of how the fluctuation works we’ll look at a client that sets budgets quarterly & likes to pay quarterly also.

Let’s say that client allocates a $500,000 budget to us in May 2007 that comes to 58.8 million yen media buying power. In June the exchange rate makes that 61 Million yen buying power. The problem is by the time the client pays in August, $500,000 becomes 57.9 million yen almost one million yen less than we began.

Other than budgets there are issues concerning at performance when the client’s KPIs are set in dollar. That campaign that you finally got the CPA to be aligned to your client’s goals just increased the CPA because of the fluctuations.

What solutions can we take to resolve issues & retain transparency amongst our clients?

Here are a few solutions that work for me.

Multicurrency reporting: Give clients reports in 2 currencies. Dollar & the local buying currency. This is great for those quarter reviews when you look & see your CPA in yen has decreased a lot compared to the previous quarter even if the decrease looked minor in dollars.

3rd Party Tracking Tools: Tools like Zap Search, & Marin keep accurate daily exchange rates. I’m a big advocate of using tools like Marin or Zap search for conversion tracking & reporting. You & your clients can see historic data that the currency can be changed on the fly.

Clients Pay in Advance: Make your clients pay the monthly budget or quarterly budget in advance to avoid confusion.

So there we have it. If you have any other solutions feel free to comment.
BTW one of the solutions is a joke :-p

Filed Under: Featured, General Tagged With: Decide DNA, Marin Software, Zap Search

I saw a white Unicorn – An adwords ad with ALL UPPERCASE Display URL

July 24, 2011 By Craig 9ine

A few months ago Google sent out a notice that there would be a change concerning the display URL on adwords. The notice stated that there would no long be any custom formatting of the display URL on Google Adwords text ads. This was actually the 2nd biggest change I can remember that happened concerning the display URL on Adwords. The first was the final landing page & the domain in the ad had to match.

I can understand the direction Google went with this in terms of quality assurance. For example
You see an ad with a display URL of www.PayPaI.com at quick gland it looks like Paypal but it isn’t it’s paypai.

Tonight I was a bit supprised going through my Gmail where the ads certainly come from Google’s Display Network.

There I saw it a white unicorn. Grazing on the side of my inbox. Just like most people who saw bigfoot by mistake I didn’t take a screen picture & opened another email.

What I did do is remember what the ad was for & copied the ad text from the company’s organic listing & emailed it to myself.
Then we have the white unicorn again….
AN ALL UPPERCASE DISPLAY URL IN AN ADWORDS AD.
Now all I want to know is “how the heck did they do it????”

ALL Caps Adwords Display URL

Filed Under: Google Tagged With: Display URL, GDN, Google, Google Display Network

WTF: No more URL formatting in Adwords

January 15, 2011 By Craig 9ine

Google has yet again announced to make one of those “Who thought of this?” changes to Adwords.
Coming soon to an Adwords account paid for by you Google will automatically start changing your uppercase display URLs to lowercase. There are companies that have in their guidelines the way to correctly write their URLs that this will affect.

This does accomplish a few things as noted on comments on other blogs.
1. Makes vanity domains useless
2. Makes the Display URL just harder to read for international viewers.
3. Makes me think that my prior post about “Google having a team of engineers that sit around thinking of which seemingly normal function can we take away to increase our profits”, just might be real.
4. Makes you realize that if they put changes in things that affects your freedom of choice & branding what will come next?

But I found a few still active & will try to get some UPPERCASE on my client’s display URLs in the coming weeks.

Filed Under: Google Tagged With: WTF

Yahoo Japan starts to use Google organic search results.

November 21, 2010 By Craig 9ine

Yahoo Japan has started showing the same organic results as Google Japan.Integrated into the search results are results from Yahoo Answers, Yahoo video, & Yahoo shopping. The paid listings hasn’t been updated yet. At the Yahoo forum for Search Ad Agencies Yahoo Japan stated they would show us a beta preview before the paid listings is switched.

Filed Under: Google Japan, Yahoo Japan

Yahoo Japan’s New Keyword Advice Tool 2010

October 20, 2010 By Craig 9ine

The Overture Keyword Tool was killed off more than 3 years ago. The tool’s data was used by online business owners, internet marketers, domainers, & just about everyone else who needed to know the search volume of their target keywords. The tool’s data was also integrated into plenty of various business’ tools.

Even though the tool was used by so many, the ratio of Yahoo’s paid clients to users who used the data varied a lot. So Yahoo made a decision to kill the tool with the promise it would come back later. Well about a year later or so it did come back. Yahoo smartened up though. Yahoo realized that Agencies gave them most of their business revenue so they made the new tool available to Ad Agencies that ran Paid search campaigns. I think I’ve had access to the Yahoo Japan tool for more than 2 years now. This new tool was really accurate on impression volumes from the previous month & would give keyword ideas & traffic click estimates.

Going back to 2 months ago I was attending a Yahoo Japan seminar for Agency workers & they informed us about yet another Keyword Advice Tool coming soon. This tool finally debuted this month. Summing it up in one word: BRAVO!! These are the new features that are absolutely amazing & useful

1. Search Volume from previous month
2. PPC Competitor level
3. Estimates/Volume based on Exact Matches or Broad
4. Estimates for only Listed Keywords (Only Google’s Traffic Estimator does this & the numbers are way off)
5. Include related keywords
6. Daypart Data
7. Gender breakdown
8. Location Breakdown
9. Age Breakdown
10. Day of the week breakdown

This new tool was made domestically by Yahoo Japan & really gives Ad Agency’s a clear advantage in the detail we can now research better keywords for our clients. I’ve told our Yahoo Reps that come to GroupM how much I love the tool already but this is a public Thank You.. You guys did a great job. I would imagine that next the tool will include Mobile data. I can’t see what else I could need after that.

Filed Under: Japan, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: Keyword Advice Tool, Overture Tool

Google removing the reporting Tab

October 18, 2010 By Craig 9ine

For the life of me I’ve been wondering why Google has removed the “Report” tab as a function on the online system.

Maybe they have tested it with the amount of superior intelligent beings there. They have tested it & seen we don’t need a clear separation between what we want to see as a quick online Summary & the Reports we pull. I would though love to actually get to know some of the people who tested this & thought that after what only years of having this easy to use function such as a Reporting Tab SEM Professionals don’t need this.

For me personally it’s only made me consider more of as a standard using 3rd Party technology such as Decide DNA on every client’s campaign just to make sure Reporting can be done with ease. In Asia the plus is that we actually have to use at least 2 search Engines Google, Yahoo Japan, Naver, Daum, or Baidu. Decide DNA or other tools like it makes it easier.

Next year I see more SEM Agencies using third party tools as a standard from this one little change. I’m wondering what’s next for Google at the GooglePlex remove the “Men” & “Ladies” signs from the Restrooms? Why stop there? Just remove the reference that it’s a restroom all together…

I’m also wondering did they have a meeting at Google like this.

Team Leader: What can we do to mess up the productivity of people managing their own Adwords accounts. This way with messed up results we make more?

Engineer 1: Let’s hide stuff suddenly!!
Engineer 2: Why would we do that?
Engineer 1: Why not? Hide stuff over time so they have to take 5X more time to optimize & we profit from their mistakes
Team Leader: Great idea!!!
Engineer 2: What could we hide? Maybe some of the things in the Reporting Tab..
Engineer 1: No we just hide the whole damn Reporting Tab.. The whole thing.. Gone!!! Poof!!! First take out the most productive easy to use downloaded reports, then the rest, & just leave the Tab up there to make them think it might come back one day.
Team Leader: Fantastic, do you think it will work? Wait, dont I know you? Aren’t you the genius that…
Engineer 1 : (Smiling) Yeah Yeah, I’m the one that hid all of the great money saving Content Network optimization features that those dang SEM Agency folks finally got us to implement. Plus I put in those great Google money making auto opted in features like auto Display your PC Campaign on any device we feel we can make money off even though iPhone is technically a mobile device.
Team Leader: Engineer 2 be more like Engineer 1.

Filed Under: Google Tagged With: Google, Reporting

Breaking News: Naver to replace Overture Korea

August 31, 2010 By Craig 9ine

Today August 31st 2010 Naver one of the 2 largest search engines in Korea has announced that they will replace Overture search advertising platform Panama with their own NHN Business Platform (NBP).

Being at anAgency in Japan working on both the Japanese & Korean market I figured that once Japan left using the Yahoo platform Korea’s search engines Daum & Naver will follow. The Microsoft Ad Technology isn’t tested in Japan or Korea yet. Bing didn’t even serve it’s own ads in Japan. I predict we will hear an announcement like this from Daum soon too.

Source: http://news.mk.co.kr/english/newsRead.php?rss=Y&sc=30800011&year=2010&no=469708

Filed Under: General

Yahoo Japan Site Explorer back online

August 13, 2010 By Craig 9ine

Only after a week Yahoo Japan Site Explorer is back online & out of maintenance mode. This is one of the possible reasons why Yahoo Japan has an argument with Yahoo Inc. (US). Their timing sucks. No other way of saying it. A week long maintenance of an important SEO tool, then it comes out of maintenance right at the beginning of the summer holiday. Hello we’re on vacation now & most people servicing their clients wanted to use the tool before the summer holiday.

Yahoo Japan knows this, we in Tokyo know this, it’s those who control the technology who sometimes don’t understand. During this time I had a chance to look over the US version & see it can accept mobile sitemaps. That’s cool. The Japanese version though is 100 IDN Domain compatible.

Filed Under: Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: Site Explorer

Yahoo Japan & Google after a week

August 7, 2010 By Craig 9ine

Ok it’s not a week yet but I got a chance to meet up with Yahoo reps this week twice. Since my job is paid search we got a chance to ask our team of reps that come by the office “Ok so what’s going on”.

You can be assured that the systems Yahoo & Google use for advertising will be separate.

Most likely on the outside things will look the same but the core technology backend for Yahoo will change.

The products & services sold by Yahoo & Google will remain seperate.

What exactly will change is not to be determined yet. Mobile search which was mainly built in Japan also has the potential to use the Google technology.

For those of us in Digital & Search Marketing in Tokyo. Most of us love the Yahoo Japan guys. We like Google too, but everyone knows that Yahoo Japan has a great team of diligent hardworking ladies & men that really support agencies to the fullest. With the companies both in Roppongi now people around town say that both teams might worry about each other selling the same product but the products & services offered are completely different. Google’s team can’t handle servicing the smaller & mid sized business’ in Japan. Yahoo Japan can. It’s just a fact.

Filed Under: Google, Google Japan, Japan, Yahoo, Yahoo Japan Tagged With: Google, Yahoo Japan