Do You Need This Man On Your Campaign?
Since our recent launch we’ve gotten a surprising number of inquiries from advertisers looking to run international paid search campaigns. Many of these inquiries come from non-US based companies looking to sell to their local markets. More recently, a smattering of these requests are coming from US companies looking to expand their existing PPC campaigns into international markets. Either way, they all ask the same first question, “Do you have optimizers in Country X or who speak Language Y?”
To date, Trada has focused primarily on US-based or English-speaking optimizers (PPC experts) because we’ve been focused primarily on small- and medium-sized US businesses. These types of businesses tend not to sell internationally (yet!). Because of this we always happily noted these requests but didn’t have much capacity to accommodate them. But recently, as we’ve started to work with a broader spectrum of companies and have begun relationships with more digital agencies, these requests are coming in on a daily basis.
So why not just put US optimizers on French campaigns (or vice versa)?
While understanding technically how to do paid search is pretty much the same in every country, there is actually quite a lot of variability in the administration and the content of non-domestic campaigns. For example, to advertise on Yahoo in the UK requires a special UK Yahoo account (you can’t just go into Yahoo Search Marketing and geo-target the UK like you can in Google). Keywords, ad copy and regional dialect come hugely into play. We’ve run a few UK campaigns, and surprisingly, we’ve seen this be true even between US-English and the Queen’s-English (I’m a Brit, so I can say this with a straight face!). A great example we learned early on is that SEM isn’t even “SEM” in the UK, its “digital marketing.” Who knew?
As a cultural example, before I started Trada I was building green data centers in Iceland using their incredible wealth of geothermal and hydroelectric power. It was surprising to see that Icelanders don’t market anything as “green” or “eco-friendly.” In their minds, (and very fairly so - they’ve been one of the most eco-friendly countries in the world for years), it’s nothing new.
New advertisers want to know how many native-speaking optimizers we have for a given region or language. And we’re listening to them. We’re starting by understanding what those numbers are (by collecting more information from our optimizers) and also where the demand is. If we have enough qualified optimizers in a region, we will start to accept advertiser campaigns for those areas or languages. We believe fully in the power of the crowd, so it’s fundamental to us that we have enough optimizers in a region to run the core crowdsourcing Trada model even with a smaller crowd.
What’s interesting is that we’re also starting to get questions about optimizer skills. “Do you have optimizers that know small business and have worked on those campaigns?” We did some quick polling and found not only was the answer, “Yes, quite a few,” but the pedigree of those optimizers was impressive.
All of this is to say that Trada is moving into a new phase. We’ve simply hit a scale where we need to say more about what’s already here and let both sides of the market leverage it. We’re building a whole new set of tools to help optimizers find campaigns their skills are appropriate to, and we’re also helping advertisers attract just the kind of optimizers they want. This might be based on skills, prior experience, Trada statistics, language or any other combination of things. We still believe in a free market (where optimizers can find and join an array of campaigns – maybe even some types of campaigns they haven’t worked directly on). But just like stock finders in the stock market with more options available to you, it’s important to be able to find the types of campaigns you want and conversely the types of optimizers you think might be great for you.
So by all means, if you want to run an international campaign or you want to experiment with your existing campaign in an international region, please don’t hesitate to ask us. If we don’t have enough optimizers yet in that region, we’ll make sure we go find them for you.
