Early observations on Adwords in Korea

Setting it up and some surprises

[Troppo]

Answering a question asked elsewhere but on another topic…to use Korean Language advertising on Google Adwords just use your normal account and set up a new campaign. On the “campaign settings” select Korean as the language and then choose the countries where you want it to be seen. Proceed as usual with the description, title and keywords but using Hangul characters.

There are some interesting aspects surrounding choice of countries and use of English search terms. After 2 weeks of Korean Adword usage the level of English to Korean search term usage is for us running consistently at 40:60 and often gets to 50:50. This is for several reasonably popular vacation travel destination 1 and 2 word searches. On that basis the English terms are well worth targeting at this time. Results also indicate that these searchers quite definitely prefer Korean language web page content.

If countries other than Korea are chosen for this campaign’s settings then my English language results appear in their normal position vis-à-vis competitors for those same English search terms in other campaigns. If however Korea only is chosen as the country then my Korean campaign ads show up above other languages on google.co.kr based searches for those same English terms.

Interested to hear any thoughts on how likely this pattern is to recur in non travel searches and whether it will change as/if Adwords appears on the Korean portals.

[GrendelKhan TSU]

hmm....thanks for the input troppo, I'm going to have to follow up a bit on this myself.

Interestingly, I have it from a reliable source that Daum's google results are NOT following the same algorithm. ie, Daum's results are not the same as regular Google .co.kr. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that Daum serves OV sponsored links, but a few tests with popular keywords seems to confirm some differences.

So how annoying is that? That implies different optimization is needed for goo .co.kr and daum (uses google results.) ....cause you know, we all don't have enough work to do. :P ugh.

I'll try to get a more complete understanding of the differences.