Knowing your target audiences' search behaviour is extremely important in PPC advertising.  It affects your click costs, advertising message, bidding strategy, and of course the campaign's ROI.

Besides keyword research tools and historical data from campaign and site analytics, another useful but not often mentioned tool is Google Trends.

Trends allow one to enter multiple keywords and compare historical search 'trends' of those words in Google. Therefore one can easily see the dynamics between marketing/news and search behaviours. (at least of Google users)

To illustrate, let's pretend I operate an online video games export web site and am looking to use PPC in Google to promote my products to the China market.  (in this case Google might not be my only vehicle as their penetration of the Chinese search market is not substantial)  I got a list of keywords using Google's keyword research tools, have a set budget, my maximum cost per acquisition calculated but I am at a lost as to how popular each platform is in this market.  Since I am new to the market, I am also not sure which city has the highest demand.

So I call up Google Trends and type in a few popular keywords.  (click on the image below) 

From the result page, I am able to tell there are more people searching for "PSP" and of those searches, most of them came from the city of Shanghai.
This means that I'll most likely exert more efforts in targeting the PSP crowd and will also geo target Shanghai.  Of course I might discovered that bidding for PSP related keywords might be fierce and those searching for the popular keyword might not turn out to be a customer.  But at least now I have more insight into the market and can plan my campaign strategies more effectively. 

I think Google Trends still have a lot of room to improve, eg: can't compare results between countries, geo info not always accurate as it relies on IP tracking, limited database prevents research into less popular keywords, 4 months lag in data, etc. but it does show promise and is a good visualization tool for assisting in campaign research.

* Google Trends is also available in Simplified Chinese

It’s now live! Check it out

Now for something fun and idiotic…

BTW, sorry about the ugly layout, just upgraded Wordpress and had no time to customize.

I don’t know whether to jump for joy or drop to a slump with this system upgrade. For those of you who don’t know, “Panama”, launched Feb 5 in the U.S. and is Yahoo Search Marketing’s latest system upgrade for all their search advertisers. Yahoo’s previous (or existing - if you are outside of the U.S.) system is quite ancient compared to Google’s and doesn’t offer nearly as much functionalities or flexibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah good old Baidu, China's most used search engine.  The search engine with awkward ad rules and a primitive user interface for advertisers.  While claiming 2 searches out of every person in China each day, I wonder how many of these were search queries for MP3 files. 

Check out this Baidu ad on YouTube. Interesting play on what is perceived to be Baidu's advantage - a better understanding of the Chinese language compared to its foreign competitors. But a search engine with the first page of results dedicated entirely to "paid" search? With "fixed" ad slots you can purchase? (instead of bid for - as with the "foreigner" search engines) Don't blame me for not being convinced of their dedication to finding the best search results for users.

Then there come news that Baidu is looking to move into the Japan market with their expert knowledge in Asian languages.  It’s interesting… but let's hope there are as much Japanese MP3 files to grab as there are in China. 

We are both blessed and cursed in Asia when it comes to computer usage and information access. We are blessed because most of us in this generation are at least bilingual so we can assimilate information not only in English but also in our native languages. We are cursed because the characters of our languages are represented as double byte character set (DBCS) in the computer world. What this means is quite a lack of support by software vendors in the single byte characters set (SBCS) world at least until recent years.

This "issue" gets additionally complicated in search engine marketing. Because the search engines want all their advertisements to be uniformly formatted, they put restrictions on how many characters can go into the ad title and description. For English this is fairly uniformed and the restrictions are usually reasonable, but when it comes to Asian languages and Asian search engines there can be some real odd limitations.

For example, Overture Japan (owned by Yahoo) put a 15 character limitation on the ad titles and 33 character limitation on the description. This is fine and dandy if your ads are entirely written in Japanese but try putting a German brand name into the ads (the German language is known for the length of its characters) and all of a sudden those 15 characters becomes extremely limiting. The problem is, Overture Japan actually treat the single byte character as double byte so while you might think 15 double byte characters = 30 single bytes, in reality your 18 character German brand name will not fit into the title space!

Granted most search users of in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, etc. search and browse in their native languages anyhow, but you can't deny the fact that English brand names (eg: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz) are typically more well recognized (and advertised). As an advertiser, I wouldn't want my potential customer to waste time in translating our ads if a well recognized name can draw their attention immediately.