[Rubber Duck]

Craig,

This Google Adwords thing is much more complexed than I had realised.

Adwords now allows targeting of advertisements by Language, Country, Region, City or Customized areas.

Obviously, if you do keyword searches from the UK, you won't see a lot of the advertising in Japan and China. Even if you use the local interface, unless you have it switched to the appropriate language you are unlikely to get anything and even then if your IP address gives you away as being outside the territory, not much is likely to get displayed.

It would therefore seem that my assumptions that Adwords in China is not populated could be completely and utterly false. Frankly I have no way of knowing.


It may well be the real problem that we are all facing is not lack of properly targeted adverts but traffic from within the relevant territories. Since I have switched to local keywords my conversion rates actually appear to have dropped off. Not surprising if much of the traffic is actually US based speculators.

It seems to me that the main problem we are encountering, is that both China and Japan have been pushing IDN plug-ins for IE that only support their own TLDs and not the gTLDs. This probably leaves most concluding that Local Characters only work in the Local Domain.

I don't think therefore that we can expect much in the way of traffic and revenue until IE 7.0 comes out and the local plug-ins go the journey along with IE 6.0.

Any feed back from your surfing over there would be greatly appreciated.

Best Regards
Dave Wrixon