Expert insight into international search markets beyond the UK and North America can sometimes be hard to find. As a result, Reform’s international team of search marketing consultants is pleased to present to you a series of research papers about key search markets around the world.
The latest addition to this series examines search in South Korea, where Naver is the engine of choice and Google accounts for only five percent of the market. Traditional algorithms have very little impact on search results here, and natural search represents only a very minor portion of traffic, often because these results are difficult to find on the page. Paid for search is prevalent in this market where search is used by users that show little prejudice between different types of results, preferring to choose whatever is nearest to the top.
Our earlier reviews focus on the markets in China and Russia. For China we look at not only search engine market share (information regularly sought after by researchers!), but also at the current strategies of the major players there, particularly Baidu and Google. We explore how Baidu allows paid links in its natural results, and examine the restrictions that Google China has to deal with, as well as looking at how the home team’s PPC set up has been dramatically changed, with Baidu’s new Phoenix Nest system for PPC being heavily influenced by Google AdWords.
In the Russia paper we look at how international companies are interacting with the search market, and explore the adoption of mobile and broadband in Russia. This is another market where Google takes a back seat, with Yandex being the search engine of choice for all demographics. We look at current search market share and offer some insight into where this and overall search engine spend appear to be heading in our forecast for 2010.
We have also examined the state of social networking in each of these three countries, finding that there are more Facebook users in Hong Kong than there are in China, South Korea and Japan combined. That said, social networking is hugely important in all three of these markets with both China and South Korea having very profitable social networking sites, and Russian users spending an average of 6.6 hours a month on social network sites.
Each of these reviews is available to download in PDF format below.
Issue 4 will feature another international market, as the tour continues around the world. Contact us if you would like a copy of the next issue before it is available on site.