International SEM

Yahoo! Japan’s Panama system will finally end on April 30th 2012

Craig 9ine — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:16:39 +0000

Yahoo has sent an update to digital agencies to remind us all that Yahoo! Japan’s Panama will be laid to rest on April 30th 2012. Last year in 20111 Yahoo! Japan in a worldwide unprecedented move replaced the US’s Yahoo! Inc. made search platform with Yahoo Sponsored Search Ver 3 which was made by Google.

Account managers will no longer be able to log into the system after April 30th 2012. The new system is up & running & is quite a bit better but since it’s made by a different provider. Truthfully the Panama platform was limiting on the data we could get from reports but it’s good to go through your old campaigns & grab what you can while you can.

Free Webinar: The Definite Guide to SEO & Inbound Marketing for Japan

Craig 9ine — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:52:56 +0000

The Outrider Japan team & Ginza Metrics will conduct a free webinar for SEO gurus & global marketing leads that want to get an idea of the region.

The Webinar series was started by Ginza Metrics with the goal of creating more awareness of International SEO. The first webinar will feature Andy Radovic Director of Outrider Japan & Shawn Finn Senior SEO Specialist for Outrider. The two are SEO experts managing the SEO strategies of some of the largest global brands for Japan, Korea & other countries in Asia.

The webinar series is conducted by Ray Grieselhuber CEO & Founder of Ginza Metrics an Enterprise level SEO suite of tools.

Seminar Time: Thursday March 15th, 2pm PST
Link for registration:
http://ginza.enterthemeeting.com/m/GKAVGLH2

About Ginza Metrics
http://www.ginzametrics.com/
Ginza Metrics is an all-in-one scalable suite of tools for SEO. The purpose of creating Ginza Metrics was to create a solution for small business owners, agencies, & global brands. It’s also one of the most international focused toolset on the market.

About Outrider Japan
http://www.outriderjapan.jp
Outrider is a leading global search marketing agency and is part of GroupM, WPP‘s consolidated media operations supporting digital marketing around the world. Outrider Japan is headquartered in Tokyo and is one of the most experienced and talented agencies representing global companies in Japan and the rest of Asia.

Facebook Video stream from FMC Event in New York

Craig 9ine — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 04:39:30 +0000

Facebook adds a livestream to their recent FMC event in New York February 29th 2012. This was the first FMC that Facebook has done with presenter Sheryl Sandberg COO of Facebook, Mike Hoefflinger, Chris Cox, & David Fischer. The presenters give us an overview of where the market was before Social & Facebook. They also take us to where it is going with Facebook.

Mike Hoefflinger goes through an overview of the new Pages for brands such as Offers & Reach Generator. These new products will take a bit of time for Brands to implement but they look promising.

Take a look at the video here.

Watch live streaming video from fbmarketingtalks at livestream.com

Yahoo Sponsored Search Version 3 (Part 2)

Craig 9ine — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:17:09 +0000

Let’s recap:

Yahoo! Japan was faced with a situation where the already insufficient Panama Platform was at a point it was going to be scrapped by Yahoo Inc. If Yahoo Inc is going to start using Microsoft’s AdCenter it was obvious to everyone they would not keep updating the Panama Platform that Yahoo! Japan was using. Would Yahoo! Japan go with an untested SEM platform that Microsoft itself wasn’t even using in Japan for Bing? Or would they build their own in the alloted time? Yahoo! Japan is actually capable of creating their own platform. They have built their own mobile platform & content platform called Interest Match, so I don’t want anyone thinking they can’t build it’s a matter of can they build in time?

There are rumors that the talks between Yahoo! Inc & Yahoo Japan didn’t exactly go the way Yahoo Inc expected it. (Again this is a rumor). It was after that that Yahoo! Japan made an unprecedented decision in the Search World. Yahoo! Japan decided to get it’s new platform custom build off of Adwords. Yep Google Adwords technology. That was announced around early summer 2010 finally the new platform Sponsored Search ver3 started it’s migration on November 8th. We couldn’t make any changes to accounts like 2 weeks before that.

The Migration from Panama Platform
Let me tell you the migration didn’t go perfect for everyone. Many search agencies & top advertisers use third party tools to control their ad bid rules & for reporting purposes. Someone forgot to check certain parameters in the development cycle because after the migration all third party SEM tools couldn’t connect with Yahoo’s new platform. When you are the person who is in charge of setting up the SEM tools for all accounts & all of them can’t connect I guarantee you there’s hours wasted trying to figure out what went wrong.

Initially they actual way to setup third party tools changed. We thought that after this give it a day or two & the data could be backfilled. Some accounts connected, some didn’t. All of the accounts had zero data the next day. All had trouble getting any data via API queries. This basically increased any SEM ad managers workload if your agency or your company utilized third party tools.

Also some of the guidelines changed with the transition. Some people may not have noticed but if you had disapproved ads you noticed. All in all any could say that the migration could have been handled but when you are replacing an entire advertising platform that is pumping million of dollars a day in media spends, could you have done any better? I feel the migration had mishaps but I think Yahoo! Japan and even the third party tool makers were trying to resolve most problems as soon as they could.

In Part 3 we’ll go over the actual system.

Please follow us on Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/pages/International-SEM/313019815395999

I just started a Facebook page for the site.

Yahoo Japan Sponsored Search ver 3 Part 1

Craig 9ine — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:21:46 +0000

Yahoo Sponsored Search Version 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…

Yahoo Japan Sponsored search Platform launch pushed till October

Craig 9ine — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 00:48:59 +0000

Yahoo! Japan which has been using the Yahoo! Inc platform Panama will finally migrate to a new system come mid October Yahoo Sponsored Search version 3. The technology backend is a modified version of Google’s own Adwords system but tweaked for Yahoo! Japan’s own requirements. The two company are not merged & will still be competitors in the Japanese market.

Yahoo Japan still dominates the search market but Google is not really far behind. Google Japan has been playing catchup & will carve it’s own niche in future markets especially Youtube, DSP, & Android technology. One problem for Google Japan was that it was often seen in Japan as a non Customer Support company but this year even by visiting the Google office myself I saw they are stepping up adding staff to help smaller companies. This is vital for Japan because Yahoo! Japan has had sales teams coordinating with smaller companies for years. I think this may have been the inspiration for them to launch the みんなのビジネスオンライン service that I discovered by accident.

The New platform will of course have a few changes such as

4 match types instead of 2
Account daily spending cap will be eliminated
For mobile you may not target each carrier individually.
Agencies will have one login for all accounts.
Yahoo’s Keyword Suggestion Tool will be updated to include mobile stats

Yahoo! Japan will try to make the migration as simple as possible & will alert customers if there are any issues. Expect not to be able to upload new campaigns, keywords, or copy for about two weeks during the migration.

Google Japan’s みんなのビジネスオンライン Service Screenshots

Craig 9ine — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 01:07:02 +0000

The Mina no Biz online story deepens. We recently found actual screenshots of the new Google Japan service!!!

Here’s screenshots from Google’s new service. This was the only page I was able to access.
The site will be at www.minbiz.jp which seems to be coming soon but for some reason it was actually fully indexed by Google.

Looks like a good campaign site targeting small business’ in Japan. As someone who runs paid search for clients if Google extends service & support to smaller business in Japan they can increase revenue. Looking forward to the launch.

****** Update Google has pulled the site completely.
I guess they are only human & didn’t realize their own search engine quickly indexed & cached the site because of the sitemap.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:novjNJdADOQJ:www.minbiz.jp/success-story/207269+%22%E3%81%BF%E3%82%93%E3%81%AA%E3%81%AE%E3%83%93%E3%82%B8%E3%83%8D%E3%82%B9%E3%82%AA%E3%83%B3%E3%83%A9%E3%82%A4%E3%83%B3%22&cd=4&hl=ja&ct=clnk&gl=jp

: Screenshot of Google’s みんなのビジネスオンライン

Google Adwords Editor goes IDN Domain friendly

Craig 9ine — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 08:07:14 +0000

Google recently updated Adwords editor to version to 9.5.1

One of the greatest change to the appplication is now it allows you to input IDN Domains for the Display URL. If you are unfamiliar with IDN Domains it’s internationalized domain names in native language.

I haven’t tested extensively but I think domains like

海外ホテル.com (international Hotel)
should command a higher CTR which should increase actual conversions to client’s sites.

You still have to comply with Google Adwords policy & the domain & the landing page must match. Some of my clients are testing & using IDN domains based on research I’ve provide for SEO throughout the last 5 years. Now clients will be able to test campaign sites with IDN domains that cater to a specific target. The display URL can be native Japan, Chinese, Russian, Arabic etc but the destination URL must use the punycode version.

Looking forward to seeing good results from this Google, thanx for this.

Google Japan’s Mina No Biz Online – みんなのビジネスオンライン

Craig 9ine — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:54:11 +0000

Google registered a few new domains last month all of the domains refer to the phrase Mina No Biz Online みんなのビジネスオンライン (Everyone’s Business Online).

Perhaps the service will be similar to the US campaign Get Your Business Online. Google has been ramping up staff lately in their still new office in Roppongi Hills. We have no feedback yet on how the GYBO went in the States or other countries.

Google adds time stamp to organic search results

Craig 9ine — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 00:19:27 +0000

I’ve just noticed that Google has started to add time stamps for article updates to the organic search results. They seem to have visually revamped a lot lately & this seems like a potentially positive change to the natural SERPs.

For users that are searching for new info it’s great to see that the article was written this month or last month, instead of an article that was written about two or more years ago.

Good going Google as I update this site more hoping to see how these changes affect my search referals.

Here’s a screenshot.

Google Adds timestamp