Digital World is our international digital marketing round up covering social, paid, content and other news with an impact on businesses marketing globally. In this week’s edition: Yandex highlights differences between Direct and Google AdWords; the best uses for APAC’s popular social channels; Weibo has 212 million monthly users; UK body demands exclusion of Right to be Forgotten lists; and Bing eating slowly into Google’s US dominance.
How AdWords can lead Yandex.Direct users astray
Russiansearchmarketing.com, Yandex’s International Business blog, has been focussing this week on Yandex.Direct, the Russian search engine’s online advertising platform. These blogs are particularly interesting for International marketers unfamiliar with the platform, as they highlight common issues encountered by those who make assumptions based on their experiences with Google AdWords.
The first blog deals with long tail key phrases. Yandex cautions that translating and importing AdWords keyword data is unlikely to work, because Russian users often use fewer terms in their searches. The second blog deals with differences in match types, and the third deals with ad-group rotation. See the full series in their SEM category, here.
What use are APAC’s most popular social channels?
As Econsultancy’s new blog points out, while Facebook, Twitter LinkedIn and Instagram consistently dominate in Europe and North America, the reality is APAC offers plenty of new platforms to understand and use. The post highlights two Chinese opportunities – the Baidu Tieba forum and Qzone which are perhaps lesser known but apparently represent great opportunities for international businesses.
Even the familiar platforms come with their own interesting facts: 94% of the online population of India has a Facebook account, whereas the platform is entirely prohibited in China. Instagram is the third most popular platform in the region, and Google+ actually breaks into top fives in Japan, Australia and India.
Monthly Active User milestones for Weibo and Alibaba
ChinaInternetWatch.com reports that Weibo’s Monthly Active User (MAU) count was up to 212 million in Q2 2015. Social advertising on the platform was a growth area too, with 443,000 customers and 163% year on year growth in revenues. Net revenue increased from $77.3 million to $107.8 million USD year on year.
Meanwhile, Alibaba saw 55% of its MAUs coming from mobile in Q2, primarily through the popular Taobao e-commerce app. Revenues have reached $3,265 million USD across the group (up from $2,464 million USD the previous year).
UK ICO orders Google to de-list Right to be Forgotten de-listing lists
The inevitable response to Google’s forced delisting of results under the EU’s “Right to be Forgotten” laws was the arrival of pages listing those results that had been removed. Despite these pages arriving within weeks of Google’s first phase of removals, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office has only just had the idea of compelling Google to delist these workaround pages.
Interestingly the ICO suggests that the existence of such resources is legitimate and in the public interest – instead, it is urging delisting when users search for the original complainant’s name. Google has 35 days to respond to the demands, or it faces fines.
Google suffers marginal US search share drop
This time last year, Google had 68.7% of the US search market. But thanks to small gains for both Bing and Yahoo, Google now finds itself down at 65%, according to new data released by ComScore. Bing now has 20.3% of the search market – technically 31.5% when the fact that it now powers Yahoo search is considered. The report also suggests that Google is attracting fewer searches overall as well, while Bing is growing.
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Image credits
Black Station photo by Flickr user Anton Novoselov
Bangalore India Cellphone Shots photo by Flickr user vgrigas
Weibo Party photo by Flickr user bfishadow
Taxi? photo by Flickr user Beverley Goodwin