Why is the amount spent on PPC low in Japan?
Someone asked me why is the amount spent on PPC in Japan much lower than in other countries. Good question. I thought about it and came up with one hypothesis.
I noticed that from the advertisers data that I have, CPC (cost per click) tends to be significantly less with Overture (Yahoo!) Japan than with Adwords (Japan) for the same advertiser running practically the same campaign. Note that what I am talking about is about one year ago. I don’t have enough data for the period after that.
If Yahoo! is the dominant search engine in Japan and its PPC ads are charging less than Google, that would keep the overall amount spent in the country at a lower level than other countries where Google is dominant.
Another thing is CTR (click through rate). From what I know, CTR was on the downslope with the ads running at Overture Japan over a year or so up to late last year. It could be - this is my wild guess - that Yahoo! Japan has improved its organic search so much, that people are not looking at ads on Yahoo! Japan’s result pages as much as they used to. Business Express - Yahoo! Japan’s registration system - can also be contributing to this effect, but I will expand on it on a future post.
Low CTR at Yahoo! Japan would also push down the overall spending in the country. And maybe, that is why Yahoo! Japan needed to shift to Panama.