Starting with a single country before replicating

Whether you are starting a keyword list from scratch or migrating the keyword list from your Adwords campaigns, start by launching search-targeted campaigns in the country that can deliver the most traffic to your website. This will allow you to test Yahoo Search Marketing’s platform thoroughly and quickly. For many industries, start with a Yahoo US account should usually ensure high traffic quality and volume for an initial test. If you are not sure, and you already have campaigns running on Adwords, study the performance of your Adwords campaigns and choose the best performed country to start.

Once the ROI of the campaigns in your first Panama account is stabilized, it is time to replicate the campaigns across to other English-speaking country accounts: UK, Australia and India.

Copywriting of localized ads

Having professional PPC copywriters to create and maintain your text ads is important, as Yahoo Pamana allows the testing of multiple text ads in a single ad group (or for a few keywords) simultaneously.

On top of that, slang, accents and spelling variations differ from countries to countries, even when all the countries mentioned above (US, UK, Australia and India) all share the same language.

From time to time, each country’s major current events may differ significantly. Writing the exact copy for the exact events will certainly improve CTR with conversions.

Tracking and Reporting

Track your campaign ROI (or just conversions) with the built-in Conversion Analytics by enabling it in your Panama account. This will allow you to figure out which countries work better than others, and then you can shift your marketing budgets towards the higher performing Yahoo accounts.

Geo-targeting non-English speaking countries

If you are to try the non-English Yahoo accounts / countries, it is best that you have a website in that country’s official language. For example, it can never provide a good user experience to geo-target France by using French keywords, French text ad copy, but an English web site.

Final Words

Implementing the above global PPC strategies for Yahoo should be easy, however, Panama does have its flaws as discussed in one of my blog posts: Problems with Yahoo Search Marketing Platform.

Allow your search engine representatives to manage your accounts

The representatives of the specific PPC search engines have full access to their platform and are the people who understand well the platform.

However, not all representatives from all 2nd or 3rd tier search engines can spend sufficient time to manage your accounts. Also, the representatives may not know enough about your industry and may struggle to optimize your campaigns for your expected ROI.

Outsource your accounts to search engine marketing agencies

Depending on the experience levels of the agencies who are to manage your accounts, some agencies possess PPC expertise can effectively lower your cost and improve the ROI of your campaigns. It will incur high campaign management cost for you, depending on the PPC business models.

For those web sites that are in niches and extremely competitive industries, you may have to spend large amount of time in educating your agencies. It will require regular communication with the search marketing agencies so that they are fully aware of changes on your web site. The changes could be new product or service launches, strategies, marketing budgets, or the entire industry.

Outsource your accounts to “work-from-home” PPC specialists

Outsourcing to work-from-home PPC specialists often cost you less than outsourcing directly to experienced search marketing agencies.

Whether the specialists possess deep knowledge about your industry, you are still required to educate them about your products or services. However, managing individually “work-from-home” specialists may usually be more difficult than managing most search marketing agencies.

Hire “part-time” students or interns to manage your accounts

This is probably the least expensive option. 2nd and 3rd tier search engines are much less complicated than top tier search engines like Google Adwords or Yahoo Panama in terms of optimization. However, most Interns come quickly and go quickly. The best is to develop effective “quick start” courses so that they will be able to start managing your campaigns right away.

Final words

With 2nd and 3rd tier search engines, you should determine how they should be best managed, how the best ROI can be achieved, and how all the challenges of PPC in 2008 can be overcome. Some companies may want to avoid 2nd and 3rd tier PPC search engines.

Top-level Domain

A top-level domain (TLD) indicates to the search engines the location of your site.

* Use a .co.uk domain name if the majority of your customers are from the UK
* Use a .cn domain if you are to target customers mainly from China

Local Hosting

The search engines can determine your web site’s location through your web hosting. You should ensure hosting your site in the country where you are targeting.

However, there are exceptional cases. For instance, your site can be hosted with a UK hosting company, but the servers (and IP addresses) of this company are actually outside of the UK. Your site will not rank well in the UK.

Business Address

Placing your local business address at the footer of your site can certainly assist Google in determining the location of your website.

Language

It helps to have the site’s content being in the language of the country that you are targeting. It helps further when the copy is optimized so that for instance UK English can be distinguished from US English.

Inbound Links

Google has been using this extensively. If the majority of your site’s inbound links are from UK-based websites, even though your target audiences are actually Australians, your web pages will be ranked higher on Google UK than on Google AU.

Google’s Local Traffic

Google has also been using this information. If the majority of your site’s visitors via Google are mainly from Australia, your web pages will be ranked higher in Australia than in the UK.

As the future of SEO is to be integrated with branding, you should build or improve your site’s brand locally. You can consider local various advertising channels, whether they are online or offline. The hard work you have spent on branding your web site will eventually result in your target audiences searching for your brand via Google and increase on clickthroughs to your site.

Webmaster Tools

Under the “Set geographic target” option in your Google Webmaster Tools account, choose “associate a geographic location with this site” and pick the preferred country for your website to geo-target.

Microsoft Online, L.P. is the contracting entity that publishes your adCenter advertisements on Live Search and the Microsoft network.

On July 1, 2008, Microsoft Online, L.P., will assign all rights and obligations in the Microsoft adCenter Terms and Conditions, and any amendments thereto, between Microsoft Online, L.P., and you, to Microsoft Online, Inc., with its principal business offices located at 6100 Neil Road, Reno NV 89570.

There will be not affect existing Adcenter accounts in terms of payment informations or payment processes.

Google Sites: 39.1%
Yahoo Sites: 24.0%
Baidu.com: 16.7%
NHN Corporation (owns Naver.com): 5.3%
Alibaba.com Corporation: 2.2%
Microsoft Sites: 1.8%
Lycos Sites: 1.7%
Tencent: 1.4%
Friendster.com: 1.2%
Sohu.com: 0.8%

Four out of 10 search engines above are local Chinese search engines: Baidu.com, Alibaba.com, Tencent, and Sohu.com. However in reality, besides Baidu the other 3 host Internet search functionality and are not strictly search engines.

Baidu.com and Alibaba – 2 Chinese search engines ranked in the top 10 in terms of the world’s search market share in December 2007. To get exposure from Chinese search engines, setting up SEM strategies that include Baidu PPC is essential.

Another research report from comScore.com shows that in April 2008 China’s Internet users topped the total number of unique searchers in the Asia-Pacific region. China’s search engine users also performed a total of 6.23 billion searches in the same month.

* China: 82.8 million
* Japan: 60.1 million
* India: 21.8 million
* Korea: 20.7 million
* Taiwan: 9.88 million
* Australia: 8.71 million
* Malaysia: 7.08 million
* Hong Kong: 2.91 million
* Singapore: 1.69 million
* New Zealand: 1.64 million

China’s Internet population rose to 210 million by the end of 2007 from the previous year’s 137 million, which is a 16% increase, according to a survey conducted by China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC). Among all the users, 72.4% had used search engines.

Among the entire Chinese Internet population, users aged from 18 to 24 made up 31.8% of the total, users aged from 25 to 30 accounted for 18.1%, and those aged from 31 to 35 accounted for 12%. Students made up 28.8% of China’s total Internet users.

Chinese Internet users who earn at least 5,000 yuan per month accounted for 5.2% of the total, and those earn between 1,000 and 2,000 yuan made up 28.7% of the total.

Google has been leveraging effectively from tail keywords with its paid search platform Adwords, however this is one of the biggest problems of Yahoo Search Marketing. Yahoo Panama makes it difficult for advertisers to efficiently scale up their global campaigns, letting alone scaling up in the long tail. Yahoo requires advertisers to set up in such a way that each country has its own invoicing process. Also, without creating multiple accounts in different countries, launching a global campaign is impossible.

By showing Google’s ads on Yahoo’s unsold ad inventories which are essentially the “under-monetized” tail keywords, both Yahoo and Google will be benefited. Google will hopefully be able to further boost traffic volume for its own advertisers through Yahoo’s long tail, and Yahoo will leverage financially. The deal will not only allow Google ads from being displayed on Yahoo’s own properties, but also on certain selected partners of Yahoo.

I expect this partnership will not make much difference to the quality of Yahoo’s PPC traffic, and hopefully not much of its existing traffic will be absorbed by Google. Now there are still 2 interesting questions left for search engine advertisers and publishers:

* Will Yahoo be replacing more of its PPC ads with Google’s ads for inventories where both Google and Yahoo can leverage more?
* Will Yahoo be eventually replacing its own Panama platform with Google’s Adwords platform?

* The domain of your ad group’s landing pages
* The geographic region of your server
* The HTML of your landing page, but it will be extended to other components on your page including images, flash, videos and Javascripts

A keyword’s load time grade is based on the average load time of the landing pages in the ad group and of any landing pages in the rest of the account with the same domain. If multiple ad groups have landing pages with the same domain, therefore, the keywords in all these ad groups will have identical load time grades.

When determining load time grade, the AdWords system follows destination URLs at both the ad and keyword level and evaluates the final landing page.

If your ad group contains landing pages with different domains, the keywords’ load time grades will be based on the domain with the slowest load time. All the keywords in an ad group will always have the same load time grade.

Multiple measurements will be taken when recording the load time of your landing pages to ensure accuracy.

When you keywords are affected by slow load time of your landing pages, an obvious sign is that your keyword’s minimum CPC will be raised. Alternatively, you may also check each keyword’s load time via the keyword analysis page. Your page’s grade is displayed next to “Landing Page Load Time”.

* The grading of “This page loads slowly” means your landing page quality and quality score may be negatively affected.
* The grading of “No problems found” means your landing page quality and quality score may not be affected.
* The grading of “No problems found” and “Load time is faster than the average in your server’s geographic region” means your landing page quality and quality score may be positively affected.

Good practices to prevent from affected negatively include minimizing the file size of your landing page by reducing the use of components that can take long time to load, such as flash or videos, and avoiding using redirects whenever possible.

The natural search results begin at position 5 and end at position 9. Five out of 10 search results on the first page are actually paid search ads.

Try some other Chinese keywords and they may not yield sponsored ad at all. Normally with popular keywords, 2 to 4 PPC ads are displayed before the natural search results. PPC sponsored ads are marked with a clickable link that says “Tui-Guang” which takes you to the specific advertiser’s website.

Baidu.com is the number one search engine in China regarding search market share. Setting aside marketing budgets and incorporating Baidu PPC into your Chinese search engine marketing strategy is absolutely essential.

Baidu.com, the search engine with the 3rd highest search volume in the world in December 2007, also offers Baidu Huobao as another text ad alternative. Huobao ads are displayed at the right hand column of Baidu’s search result pages.

Pagerank has not been an accurate indicator to show webmasters how a particular site should be ranked comparing to other sites. Rather, many experienced webmasters and SEO experts have spotted Google, in combating search engine spams, is in favor of using trustrank and domain age to rank websites in the SERP.

SEO is easier than ever and will become a commodity within the next couple of years, as all the optimization rules have been clearly defined and have become standard practices. SEO and web site usability will be consolidated and integrated into each individual company’s business. Web developers and designers will be required to have full set of knowledge on SEO on-page optimization. Branding for a site will become an essential strategy to compliment SEO for gaining trust and popularity from Google.

The future prospects for today’s SEO experts will depend on whether they possess a broad enough scope to evolve their knowledge - what works on the web and what the customers want most from a web site. A person’s full-packaged Internet marketing experience today will become tomorrow’s solid expertise.

When natural search ranking cannot be guaranteed as easily as in the past, Google leaves another effective search engine marketing channel open to search engine marketers - PPC. Those in the SEM industry who are able to overcome the challenges for paid search in 2008 will continue to shine.

The merge with Koubei.com is believed to enhance Yahoo’s localization in China as a search engine, and to add to Yahoo’s strength in building better services on life search.

The Alibaba group already owns Taobao.com (the largest B2C site in China) and Alibaba.com (the largest B2B site in China). With the group’s successful eCommerce experience, it is only a matter of time to see eCommerce being integrated into the existing Koubei community.

There are a total 3 different experiments available. The other 2 experiments are “Keyword Suggestions” (similar to Yahoo’s search assist) and “Alternate Views for Search Results”. You can only join any one of the 3 experiments at a time, but you can simply disable one experiment and then enable the other one right away.

Previously, Google did launch its own daohang (or startup page of website links), but it is believed Google has not been able to leverage from it. However this time, it is believed that Google will leverage from placing Adwords contextual ads or syndicating Adwords search ads on 265.com.

Google’s biggest Chinese search engine competitor, Baidu.com, previously bought a similar site, Hao123.com, only for its high traffic volume. Hao123.com once ranked as the 25th of the highest traffic volume site in the world. At the time of Baidu’s acquisition, Chinese users were mostly very immature when using the Internet and had to rely on daphang type of sites to find websites.

Baidu also has its search box placed on a prominent position of hao123.com. It seems like Google still has a long way to go, for understanding the nature and behavior of China’s web users.

With PPC being a great channel for both new lead generation and high volume of sales drive, many international businesses are considering the implementation of global PPC strategies on Yahoo is as essential as on Google Adwords. However, the Panama system has major issues that have been upsetting advertisers with global marketing strategies.

Inefficiency to Scale Up Volume

Experienced PPC advertisers all understand that it requires considerably more time in launching new global campaigns on Yahoo Search Marketing than on Adwords, mainly due to Yahoo Panama’s country-based platform.

You have to create a Panama account for each country you target, even the countries all shared the same language, say English. This means the US campaign you set up in your US account will not be shown to UK audience through the Yahoo UK search engine or its UK search partner sites. Essentially for each country, you will have to set up campaigns separately. This will involve a lot of efforts in cloning your existing campaigns across different accounts.

Scaling up campaigns globally (or across multiple countries with the same language) via the Panama system is considered extremely time-consuming for many PPC advertisers. They would prefer to spend their efforts on Adwords in expanding into new campaigns and refining existing campaigns.

Poor Market Research Tool

It can be worse for advertisers who are more adapted in using Adwords, when they are used to start with the “target-all” strategy. Some PPC experts use Adwords as a great market research tool to get a good overall global view of their industries. Once they have discovered exactly where their marketing budget should be spent, they shift towards the areas where the best ROI can be obtained.

Panama is never an efficient or effective market research tool, as it lacks efficient scalability. Yahoo has never been and will not be able to leverage the marketing expenditure from this area, comparing to Google.

Complications on Campaign Maintenance

Google is way leading in the area of efficient campaign setup and maintenance with its self-developed campaign management tool, Adwords Editor. Yahoo Panama relies on a single-page spreadsheet template for the same purpose.

Panama’s spreadsheet template consists of 34 columns including settings of information for campaigns, ad groups, keywords and ads. With 4 different types of rows (for campaigns, ad groups, ads and keywords) in the mix, the high level of data manipulation makes the maintenance become a mistake-prone task.

Complicated Financial System

Yahoo advertisers who are on the pre-paid option have to fund each one of the regional Panama accounts with his credit card. Those on the post-paid option will have to prepare for insertion orders and work with invoicing per account.

Advertising across different countries also means an advertiser will be billed in different currencies when it comes to Panama accounts of different countries. The US account will be billed in US dollar, while the UK account will be charged in British Pound Sterling. Also with all the different currencies, it adds difficulties to reconcile marketing cost.

Inflexible Reporting System

Yahoo Panama provides users 7 major reports below. However, each of the reports lacks flexibility. For instance with the keyword performance report, you will not be able to only extract performance of keywords for a specific ad groups (or a few selected adgroups).

* Performance Summary
* Ad Performance
* Daily Performance
* Keyword Performance
* Performance by Geographic Location
* Daily Spending Performance
* URL Performance

Final Words

For Yahoo to prevent Google from pulling away in paid search, it has to improve Panama in many areas listed above. For related topics, you may also want to re-visit my previous post about the importance of versatile PPC platforms.

The leading Chinese search engine, Baidu:

Google China:

Yahoo China Search 360:

Yahoo China Portal:

Sina.com China:

Sohu:

Tencent’s QQ.com:

Taobao.com:

The earthquake happened in Sichuan province on 12 May has been the worst to hit China since 1976. Up till today the death toll of the quake has gone over 34,000 and some 245,000 people were believed injured in the disaster.

Profile

Create your personal profile, which can be used very much like an online resume (or CV). Besides your current job, the jobs you have participated in the past and your educations / qualifications, you can also fill in a summary, and honors and awards. There is this website section available, so that you can enter your company’s web address and your personal blog’s URL, should you have one.

There is an advantage to SEO your LinkedIn profile. You can use your LinkedIn profile to complement your personal blog in the SERP. A keyword search on my name “Gordon Choi” returns my PPC blog at positions 1 and 2, but also returns my LinkedIn profile at positions 5 and 6.

You can even place PPC ads on Google pointing to your personal Linkedin Profile page:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/gordonchoi

Remember to also upload your photo to improve credibility.

Network Expansion

The purpose of being on LinkedIn is that you want to be within a network of people. Once you have your profile created, you should send invitation to connect to people you know. How LinkedIn works is that once you have connected to your colleagues, friends, and business partners, you will be able to further expand your network by connecting to their colleagues, friends, and business partners. So at a later stage, the more “contacts” you have on LinkedIn, the easier for you to get connected to more people.

Recommendation

Get recommended by people you have worked with – managers, colleagues, and clients can be the most appropriate references to write recommendations about the work you have involved in the past. This can help your possible future employers and other people when considering you being one of the candidates.

“Gordon is an exceptional paid search professional. His knowledge, experience and insights, together with high work ethic, were applied to a successful leadership of a 16 person strong paid search team. He is a rare talent in the PPC field.”

October 19, 2007 - Michael Leeman, Director, Clicks2Customers, Inc.

Answers and Q/A

Participate in linkedIn Answers and Q/A on topics of your expertise. This can certainly be a good way to show your expertise to your future references.

Company Page

As an individual LinkedIn user, you can’t do much about the content on the company page. However, the company page does display employees who are more active in engaging with other users. You should also enable notifications on your profile and status changes, if you want to possibly have your name shown more often on the company page.

Other Benefits

Besides branding yourself and expanding your networks, you can also find out industry and/or company news your colleagues / friends / business partners have been reading and discuss the topics with them.

As entrepreneurs, you can join LinkedIn user-created groups and discover new business partnerships and opportunities of your industries.

Other than all the above, on your profile page there is this one field right under your name (which appears at the top) called “Your Professional Headline”. From time to time, I have seen some extremely interesting and creative professional headlines written by other LinkedIn users:

* Man of leisure
* Senior Manager looking for a challenge
* Call me a media person

I would love to know if they receive more daily views because of their creative headlines! I went for a conventional, boring and appropriate professional headline that simply says “Head of PPC at Alibaba.com”.

Statistics

According to this report of Compete.com, LinkedIn.com ranked in the top 10 of all social networks in February 2008, with competitions from the highly popular social network sites such as Facebook and Myspace.

Other Social Network Sites

Previously, I have also listed other social media marketing opportunities.