Japanese clicking on contextual ads

[bill]

According to a recent survey (in Japanese) [japan.internet.com] over 70% of Japanese surveyed have clicked on contextual ads in the SERPs. Here's a rough translation of the results:

Q: Have you ever clicked the ads in the SERPS?

Yes 72.78%

No 17.32%

Not sure 6.78%

Didn’t know there were ads there 3.12%

Q: How often do you see search ads?

Almost always 18.39%

Often 39.67%

Sometimes 35.14%

Rarely 6.80%

Q: Do you think search ads are useful?

Very useful 2.64%

Useful 14.11%

Somewhat useful 45.34%

Don’t care 32.62%

Rather not have them 5.29%

[directwheels]

do you have similar stats for the US you can post as a comparison?

Also, does anyone own Chinese or Japanese sites that are running AdSense? If so, can you tell me how your eCPM compares to English (US) sites?

I am guessing that because keyword advertising in China isn't as popular yet, most keywords aren't very competitive, which means a lower payout per click. But that's just my guess.

[LifeinAsia]

We're not tracking Japanese separately, just because of the way we have some of the sections setup.

But we do run AdWords in Japanese as well as English. Although it's still sort of an apples/oranges comparison since we have different keywords, bid amounts, and targeting, but the Japanese CTR is about 1/2 to 1/3 of our other campaigns, and conversion rates are 1/4 to 13th of other campaigns. (Note we also run Japanese ads on the content network, while we don't run English ads there, so that also skews the results.)