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Canada, and Germany) all either share strong economic ties to the US, have surging economies, have very high English-speaking populations, or some combination of several of these. Also, in all of these countries, Google acts nearly as a monopoly of search, with no significant competition from other search engines. The Effect of Local Search Engines Eastern Europe and Russia have a surprising number of spots at the bottom of the list, with incredibly cheap CPCs. We know that some of this is due to a struggling Russian economy helping to cut CPCs for foreign advertisers.
It’s also likely due to the presence of Yandex, a competitor search engine to Google, which has an IT Numbers overwhelming majority share of the market in that corner of the world. In similar markets, where Google doesn’t have a majority share of search, like Japan and South Korea (where Yahoo Japan and Naver are the locals’ search engines of choice), we also see discounted CPCs from Google (much as here, in the US, Bing has cheaper CPCs). A Growing Mobile Only Audience South and Central America, Africa, and much of the Middle East have CPCs far below the US average.

While this is likely for a number of economic reasons and limited internet penetration in these regions, a growing factor is the rising number of users who are accessing the internet and Google on their smartphones. Internationally, mobile CPCs are generally cheaper than desktop CPCs, so a successful mobile strategy is an increasingly critical role in converting these international users. Do you see any other interesting trends in the data? Are you seeing similar trends in your accounts or in your industry? Mark Irvine MEET THE AUTHOR Mark Irvine. .
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