Commentary

How Kenshoo Migrates Search Campaigns To Yahoo Japan

Yahoo-japanAccessing multiple devices signals a change in consumer behavior -- not just in the United States, but worldwide. In Japan, Yahoo offers a service dubbed Unified Campaigns that supports the growing need to serve search ads across devices and track performance, but how do marketers migrate a campaign from one country to another or across devices? Kenshoo on Wednesday said it began offering support for the product.

Kotaro Haruta, vice president of sales for Asia-Pacific, leads the partnership to support client paid-search campaigns running on Yahoo Japan, which owns more than half of the Japanese search market and serves as the country's most visited site, according to Alexa.

Translating ads from English into Japanese correctly remains one the biggest missed opportunities for brands, according to Jon Rosen, director of product marketing at Kenshoo. Translation requires getting someone to localize the content, not just translate words. Japanese consumers, like many others, are sensitive to poor translations. However, when translations are done well they represent an extremely e-commerce-friendly customer, especially for making mobile purchases.

"With the upcoming migration to Google enhanced campaigns, porting those existing AdWords ads will be difficult for many international sites, but not Yahoo Japan," Rosen said. "Yahoo! Japan will be migrating in July to Unified Campaigns, their equivalent of AdWords Enhanced Campaigns. For those companies looking to move their AdWords enhanced campaign structure to Yahoo Japan, this international site will support the same enhanced campaign structure. That means the same ads will yield access to 80% or more of the market."

When I asked why U.S. brands doing business in Japan should care about services from Yahoo Japan, Rosen said the migration to Unified Campaigns comes from Google because marketers won't need to worry about the structure of Enhanced Campaigns being different.

Rosen said Kenshoo's technology aims to help with cross-platform bulk copy capabilities. He also mentioned the forthcoming automated bid and optimize feature in Unified Campaigns for targeting on smartphones, similar to Enhanced Campaigns on Google AdWords.

Kenshoo follows companies like Millennial Media, which expanded to support Japan earlier in May. Then there's the Yahoo Japan and AdTruth deal, as well as BrightTag, to support the collection and delivery of data for re-marketing and media to advertisers.

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