As an SEM company with a global reach, we were very interested in getting some feedback from other people regarding their experiences.

The panel included online marketers from Japan, China, Singapore, Australia and Latin America.

Common to all these (and other) countries is that they are much more diverse than the US. Not only do many have multiple official languages but there are also cultural linguistic differences within languages. In asian countries one is also confronted by the problem of the character sets, and the search engine’s interpretation of ‘context’.

In China and Japan, there are multiple ways of expressing intent and different demographic groups use a different vocabulary.

Australia is the exception in that it is fairly homogeneous but Internet penetration is not as great as expected from a 1st world country, and relatively few users have broadband.

In Japan and Singapore on the other hand broadband is widespread and users are internet savvy. In Japan people can even scan bar-codes with their cellphones to compare prices online. Really cool stuff which shows the enormous potential of mobile search.

The Chinese market is massive, yet difficult to penetrate, even Google plays second fiddle to Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant. E-commerce is still fairly small in China and it seems to me the country is about a decade behind the US in terms of web usage (e.g. portals are the biggest sites in China)

Overall, the panelists confirmed what we experience in practice: every country is different and it is crucial to understand the local culture in order to set up a successful campaign. Don’t outsource your keywords and adcopy to a translation agency and expect that you’ll end up with a performing campaign. You need native speakers to understand the intricacies of foreign markets. And even then, not all foreign ventures are a guaranteed success…