Global Search Engine Marketing & Social Media News And Analysis » Regional Strategy

Neighbours Are Not Twins – Why Knowing Every Market Is Crucial

Steven Plimmer — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 15:41:49 +0000

I work for a PPC agency that advertises across nations and in most cases, we use native language speakers to run campaigns for each country. This isn’t overkill, it’s essential.

If you’re based in a single country and trying to internationalise your customer base or formulate an international online strategy, it must go beyond simply regionalising your campaigns. This is because countries may be close to one another, or even neighbours, but they can harbour radically different characteristics that materially affect how you would build your digital marketing.

Even Europe, with the inevitable homogenising effect of EU membership and the common currency, nevertheless is enormously diverse in a number of societal, infrastructural and economic ways. I’ll take a classic example of this and outline the differences between Iberian siblings, Spain and Portugal.

There are lots of official sources of data available through EU sites but Google has helpfully brought them together in this tool if you’re researching countries and I’ll pick out some of the official statistics to illustrate the diversity I’m thinking of.

Tech:

Most of Portugal broadband penetration is only about two thirds that of Spain.
Portugal has prohibitively expensive data plans for mobile devices, so smartphone penetrations is much lower (at 18%) than Spain (at 44%).

Demographics:

Portugal’s population is older than Spain’s (Median age in Portugal is 40.4 vs Spain’s 39.5)
Portugal’s births are 5% less than its deaths, whilst Spain’s births are 25% higher than deaths so demography is continuing to diverge in this respect.
Under 20% of Portuguese 30-34 year olds have passed Tertiary Education vs Spain’s 40%
However, there are around 6400 Portuguese with Post-Graduate qualifications (e.g. Doctorates) vs the far larger Spain’s 7200.

Employment/economy:

Portugal’s unemployment rate is around 10% vs Spain’s 26% (up from 9% in 2008!)
Employment rates are 62.3% (Portugal) vs 55% (Spain).
Portugal, however, is in the deeper recession when measuring GDP.
Portugal’s GDP is about 80% of the EU average whilst Spain’s is slightly higher than the average.
Portugal’s average wage is around €6,000 lower than Spain’s.
Tax receipts are disproportionately higher in Portugal since tax on goods and services is double that of Spain.
This is not offset by the lower income taxes seen in Portugal.

Politics:

Portugal is a Republic
Spain has a constitutional monarchy

Daily domestic culture:

Lunch and dinner is taken hours earlier in Portugal than in Spain
The Portuguese don’t go in for Tapas – which are one of the causes for the late Spanish dinner time.
This means that the working Portuguese are more often at home than the working Spanish since tapas keep the latter out of the home until later in the evening.

So you put all this together and you can see that many of these disparate comparisons could play heavily into any marketing approach depending on what you’re advertising.

Did this challenge any of your assumptions? I was certainly surprised from my perspective at the large education difference, the big employment difference and the mobile data use difference.

So if I had simply done a “copy-and-paste” of my Spanish campaigns along with some translation, I would have started off completely on the wrong foot.

Have you discovered any large differences between neighbours that affected your marketing efforts? Leave a comment.

8 Strategies To Reduce Duplication When It Affects You On A Global Scale

Andy Atkins-Krüger — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 11:21:15 +0000

It sounds like something from a health ad. “1 in 3 will be affected by duplication at some point in their lives.” There’s no doubt that all SEOs have had to look at duplication and its impact in some form or other. But your SEO live is on a global scale — then you’ve got a global duplication problem and it’s not going to be quite so simple to fix.

Multiple Versions Of The Same Content? You Might Be Suffering From Duplication!

By my estimation, there are 8 strategies global marketers can adopt to deal with duplication. The greatest problem occurs with the use of “world languages” by which we mean those languages of global scale which are important in many countries – such as Spanish or English for instance:

Move Your Site To Local Domains
Set Geo-Targeting Settings in Google’s Webmaster Tools
Re-Write Content
Use Combined Canonicals With Hreflang Tags
Structure The Presentation Of Your Content Differently
Vary The Content You Deploy By Country
Deploy Robots.txt Or “No Index” Tags Selectively And Carefully!
Do Nothing At All

1. Move Your Site To Local Domains

Using local domains or ccTLDs has a lot of advantages — but reducing the impact of duplication on a global site is not generally a function that is widely recognised. Confirmed by Google, as you can see in this Google Webmaster thread, local domains helps Google to understand which country the content belongs to. Local domains are — and probably always will be — a very strong signal for search engines.

2. Set Geo-Targeting Settings in Google’s Webmaster Tools

Within your Google Webmaster account, you can specify the location to which your content is targeted using either sub-domains or folders to indicate which content goes where. However, most advice you will read on the web simply says “Set the webmaster settings”, but there’s a little bit more to this than meets the eye.

For the content which is targeted at a specific country, let’s take Mexico as an example, only searchers querying the Mexican version of Google will find that content readily. What this means is, if you had two versions of Spanish on your website and you targeted one at Spain and the other at Mexico, you would actually perform less well in the other Spanish-speaking countries.

A solution for you may be to target all of your Spanish content to their individual countries and then to allow one Spanish version to remain open for the rest of the world. However, make sure you test this to see that it’s working.

3. Re-Write Content

This is an obvious strategy though the one which most are actively striving to avoid because of the level of cost involved with maintaining various different versions of the same language. However, don’t knock it. there are reasons why you would indeed want to do this including that you want to speak more relevantly to the target audience in the country you’re addressing.

Don’t forget also, that the strategies in this list can be mixed and matched. You may in fact want to harmonise a number of Spanish pages with the audience in Argentina to improve the conversion rate — but leave the back-up content to other duplication avoidance strategies.

4. Use Combined Canonicals With Hreflang Tags

OK so this one can get confusing. First you need to decide which is your most important version of all the same content. You point the canonical tags at that URL.

Then you pair the content within that group using Hreflang tags which can either be in the header or now in xml sitemaps. All content has to be paired for security reasons — otherwise unnconnected sites could point content at each other!

So you would point the content about widgets for Spain- Spanish to Argentina-Spanish indicating that the content you’re pointing to is for Argentina. That Argentina content has to point back at the Spain-Spanish content too.

What does this achieve? The top URL — or canonical — will be the content which is chosen to rank folding in the other versions and their links.

So if you’ve indicated that Spain-Spanish is the most important content, that is the version which will be displayed. However, the Hreflang tag for Argentina means that someone searching Google in Argentina will be shown the content for Spain BUT importantly the URL they’ll be given will be the one for Argentina. Confusing ha? But clever if you can do it!

5. Structure The Presentation Of Your Content Differently

You can also design your site to show the content differently in different markets which could be useful if certain sections are duplicate but not all. For instance, if you used Ajax drawers on your site (you know those buttons you click which expand and suck content in?), you can set one version to be followed using “#!” in the URL — but drop that off in the subsidiary versions.

This is just one example — but there are other ways to only present certain content in some countries or group it together differently, but care is needed and this usually works best only on sites where a relatively small and subsidiary area of content is what’s causing difficulties for the rest of the site.

6. Vary The Content You Deploy By Country

One solution is not to show the same content to different countries. I know that’s kind of stating the obvious, but where this applies is where you have lots of content available and you realise that some is more relevant in some markets than in others — so you pick and choose what you display using — probably using some of the other strategies as a back-up.

7. Deploy Robots.txt Or “No Index” Tags Selectively And Carefully

If you’re targeting Brazil and Portugal, do you really want to pick up Portuguese speakers in Angola? A very quick and easy fix is to deploy a Robots.txt exclusion of Angola. This doesn’t mean it won’t show up in Angola to users who type the URL or even search. It’s just that when they search, they’re initially going to find either the Brazilian or Portugal sites.

You can also use “No Index” tags on page but these are a little less reliable and more difficult to manage.

8. Do Nothing At All

No sniggering please. Doing nothing is indeed an option. Before you deploy fancy tactics, you do need to ask yourself the question, “What problem does this cause?” and if it means that users see content from Germany when they were in Austria — but it has little impact on your performance, you may indeed be better doing nothing or rather doing something else more useful!

PPC War: Interflora Vs. M&S – The Come Back

Christophe Bernigaud — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:35:29 +0000

The war between Interflora and Marks & Spencer has been on-going for some time now, here is a quick wrap up of the situation:

Interflora sued M&S in 2009 for bidding on its trademark in the UK (when a user would search for Interflora in the UK, the M&S ad would appear).
The High Court of Justice of Wales and England refers the questions to the ECJ
2010, the ECJ ruled that Google was not liable for trade mark infringement by selling the advertising service to rival companies.
March 2011, ECJ‘ Niilo Jääskinen - the Advocate General of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) – advised for Marks & Spencer to be found liable for trade mark infringement by using ‘Interflora’ as a Google AdWord keyword.

Last week, the ECJ ruled in favor of Interflora which needs to be applied by the High Court in the UK in order to appreciate M&S’ liability.

The ECJ said that trademark owners can stop companies using their brands as triggers for adverts for competing products if that use “substantially interferes with the proprietor’s use of its trademark to acquire or preserve a reputation capable of attracting consumers and retaining their loyalty”. The interference is yet to be defined though…

Interflora’s marketing director, Michael Barringer, says: “This judgment backs all the hard work and effort we have put in to defending the Interflora brand. People searching the internet for “Interflora” want “Interflora, the flower experts and no one else. Our brand stands for quality and service and together with our network of independent florists, we have spent the last 80 years building this reputation.”

Christmas 2010: a snapshot of Online European Shoppers

Christophe Bernigaud — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 16:13:48 +0000

Today Monday November 29th is ‘Cyber Monday‘. The biggest shopping day of the year?

Or is it Monday December 6th 2010 referred as ‘Mega Monday‘ where sales are expected to hit over €uro 1million per minute…

October 2010, IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index is expected to increase by 16 per cent in 2010 vs. 2009 for online Christmas sales, reaching £6.4billion.

Different forecasts come from various sources. For instance, Hi Media expect the European online Christmas sales to represent over 10 per cent of the European overall Christmas sales, representing respectively €uro 32 billion of the overall €uro 313 billion.

The UK, Germany and France will represent the highest total spend for the Christmas 2010 season, accounting for 65 per cent of the overall European Christmas spend:

UK – €uro 77.2 billion
Germany – €uro 64.5 billion
France – €uro 62.5 billion
Spain – €uro 31.2 billion

Denmark, Norway and Sweden are forecasted to spend the least overall at €5.4bn, €6.1bn and €9.6bn respectively.

How strong is online Christmas shopping in Europe?

UK – highest in Europe with €uro 13 billion – i.e 17% of the overall 2010 UK retail Christmas sales
Germany – €uro 8.2 billion – i.e 13% of the overall 2010 Germany retail Christmas sales
France – €uro 6.3 billion – i.e 10% of the overall 2010 France retail Christmas sales
Spain – €uro 624 million- i.e 2% of the overall 2010 Spain retail Christmas sales

Norway will spend €uro 0.73 billion online and Denmark €uro 0.61 billion.

Pierpaolo Zollo, from Kelkoo says: “Internet sales across Europe are set to be more important than ever this Christmas, with consumers spending record amounts online, and online commerce acting as the primary driving force for overall retail growth during the festive season.”

Don’t forget to track your online audience thanks to free simple tools such as Google Analytics and make sure you run an online reputation management program.

Search Engine Marketing Campaigns: the link to your offline marketing campaigns

Christophe Bernigaud — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 13:10:50 +0000

Brand development works usually focus on the high volume medium: TV, radio, billboard, newspaper, etc…

Marketers often forget about supporting their offline communication efforts with an online campaign. I am not talking about social media, viral marketing or buzz marketing campaigns… I mean a real added value Search Engine Marketing strategy based on Pay Per Click / Search Engine Advertising campaigns and SEO works!

The 2007 iProspect survey - based on 25 closed–ended questions to 2,322 individuals about their behaviors, attitudes, and preferences as they relate to games, digital imaging, portable devices, and service bundles – shows the following trends:

Offline channels – television, radio, billboard, outdoor, sports and transportation advertising, etc – strongly influence online search users to run queries on search engines, the search queries are based on brands, company name, products, service name, slogan that were communicated on in the offline channel message. Television and word of mouth are the main offline search influencers!
Branded keywords strongly impact search queries vs. the non–branded keywords (company advertising, slogan, or “other”) – 68% vs. 18%. Company, Product and Service Names are the most used keyword types
Most importantly, a third of the searches ran under the influence of an offline marketing campaign result into an online purchase!

Tactics as simple as displaying / announcing the company’s URL are the most effective.

More rare, though super effective, are offline campaigns that state “search keyword: “Google adwords” — sending online users to search results pages where savvy marketers know searchers will find their company listing at the top of either or both the natural or paid search results.

Given the above facts, it is key for an effective communication campaign to plan a PPC campaign as a major online channel to fully capitalise on the potential volume of search queries. A dedicated fully optimised web page will also help such initiative… Especially if you plan yoru campaign around a made up keyword or keyphrase – allow for mispelling etc…

Last but not least, track your results as the campaign runs!