Brand bidding: transcreant or miscreant?
By Gordon Husbands | International marcoms, MSEM | No comment yet
Are you are aware of brand bidding? Is someone surfing off your brand on Google Search? Don’t know what I’m talking about?
Try the following >
- Enter the name of your company into Google Search.
- Get your colleagues and friends in other countries to do the same.
- Check your search results – you should be top of the organic search results, right
- Notice any paid or sponsored ads appearing above or to the right of your search results?
- Are they by any chance promoting one of your competitors?
What you are witnessing is brand bidding. The example I’ve used in the presentation at the bottom of the post shows very clearly what is happenning – check out the ads on the right-hand side.
Shrink-wrapped, instant global website – a worrying trend?
By Gordon Husbands | International marcoms, MSEM, Transcreation | One comment so far
I have noticed some rather strange localization offers on the web recently, various companies promoting ‘ instant global websites‘ , ‘windows on the world’ – all on the cheap, of course. Is this a new phenomenon or just something I had not spotted before? (I would welcome any sane input on this.)
To quote one example from many: “Now for less than $5,000 US, you can have close to 90% of the world’s web visitors find you when they search for your keywords in their native language. The Window to the World page will then lead them to the rest of your website.”
Adwords, TMs and translation
By Gordon Husbands | International marcoms, MSEM | 2 responses so far
Adwords, TMs and translation go together like ‘fire and petrol’ or ‘dictionary and gorilla’. Blasphemy?
Translation Memories (TMs) are an accepted, if not mandatory, part of the web content translation process. Indeed, it’s regarded as nigh on a hanging offence by most corporate procurement departments for any vendor found guilty of not applying TMs to each and every translation project.
Yes, well maintained TMs can reduce translation cost and turnaround time when applied consistently to high volumes of content, both of which are stated and laudable aims for any supply chain manager. But, like the old cliche about crocodiles and swamps, it is easy to lose sight of the reason for translating the online content in the first place.
Adwords Translation – an oxymoron?
By Gordon Husbands | International marcoms, MSEM, Transcreation | 3 responses so far
Good question. While the two words are not quite a full-blown oxymoron, there is an element of conflict if not contradiction.Can or should Adwords be translated or is there a better way?
Search marketing is big and commands big spend in companies large and small with the demand for search analysts reaching the levels that html programmers achieved in the 90s. While the US market clearly leads the global field in terms of the adoption and sophistication of search marketing techniques, international brands are hungry to generate similar improvements in lead-generation and conversion across all their major markets, particularly the growing or more resilient ones.
