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Are there any reports or evidence that prove the web surfing habits of Europeans? Would they rather surf a .com site than a .uk, .de, or a site with their country of origin?
I market a widget training service and target both US and Europe. About a month ago, I launched an adveritising keyword campaign with Overture-UK and Overture-DE (yes, the words are in German) with our more competitive keywords, but I do not receive much traffic at all.
My question: Do Europeans use American websites more than they use European web sites when shopping? (i.e. Lycos.com vs. Lycos.uk)
Thanks!
Generally your question is easily answered: No, europeans surf sites in their own language, which in their majority will be national versions of international brands like Google, Lycos etc, plus the native sites.
Going into specifics would be a very very long story. Nevertheless that's what you would need to do when effectively targeting to different european market places.
As a starter you might want to look at the who's who of the most important SEs in Europe:
European Search Engine Chart [webmasterworld.com]
I agree though that local cctld's are the most common ones seen in the SERPS and therefore most people will be comfortable dealing with cctld's IMO.
Welcome at Webmasterworld.
Overture-DE (yes, the words are in German)
Do you mean the words are in German but the site is not? That sounds like a waste of money. If your site is English only, you should bid on English words - even in Germany. As far as I can see only the French and some Brits will disciminate .com domains and prefer a .fr/.co.uk.
Language is much more important than TLD.
What heine said "europeans surf sites in their own language" seems to be true. A .com I also run with content in english is mostly refered to by .com domains.
Hope this helps
It is a lot better to have separate sites for different languages (english-mysite.com, german-keyword.com, french-keyword.com ); the best of best is having local tld: .de, .fr etc.
Comparing two sites having similar content, similar number of pages and targeting similar keywords, the separate language site get four times the traffic that the other site with the structure mysite.com/targeted_language.
Uk users - many prefer to use a .co.uk SE for what they percieve as more relevant results (not 100% true 100% of the time though).
Some search for variations like cars uk, web design uk etc - try a keyword tool like Epsotting sor Overtures to investigate for your site.
But a fair number still use .coms (google, yahoo, msn). Lycos.com redirects to Lycos.co.uk for visitors from UK IP addresses, out of interest. So does HotBot.
This UK mixutre of .com and .co.uk useage is due to the sahred language and the roll out of .co.uks for the big SEs after early UK surfers had adopted the .coms.
Language pushes users to their regional implementation - as do the partnerships regional ISPs have with SEs.
[webmasterworld.com...]
As soon as more statistical data on local option usage within Google surfaces, I am sure we will see a proliferation of local tld's.
Loosing 11% of your market is nearly equal to dropping all attention for any other search engine other than Google at this moment for me.
