How people search for Sex? Do Vietnamese search for sex the most !!!

It came across me today again the news about how Vietnamese searches for the sex the most on Google. I think some online newspaper published the news and my colleagues jokingly mentioned that to me.
It's my nature to second guess everything they say in the news so i decide to see for myself how people in Vietnam search for adult content.
Doing this not only satisfies my curiosity but also help me to bring across a couple of points:

• A number in silo means very little (close to nothing actually). You need to understand the context, being able to segment the data to find the "real" truth
• How dependent we , as human being, are on Search engine and how incredibly powerful the data from search engine has become!
• How search behavior is something that needs to pay much attention to, people in different territories do search differently. 
• It's easier to showcase a complex/dry concept by using a "funny" example

NOTE: the below post is NOT family safe. So don't leave your computer unattended while reading this post.

Ok let's dive in right the way

1. What is the search volume for the search term "sex" for Vietnam market?

Finding this out is fairly easy using Google keyword tool.

For the month of December 2009, the search volume for "sex" in Vietnam is about 45,500,000 , contributing about 10.1% of the global search volume (414,000,000) for the same month.

10% is quite a big contribution isn't it?

If i change the search term match type to "exact match", which basically means i want to find out how many people search for the exact word "sex" in Vietnam in December 2009.

The result is below:

As it turns out there were 6,120,000 times the exact word "sex" was searched for in Vietnam in December. This time round Vietnamese search volume "only" contributed 7.3% (Global volume is 83,100,000).

Why am i talking about the search volume of the exact word "sex"?

Well it's because i want to show that 87% of the time people in Vietnam search for other variations of "sex", which makes sense because the exact word "sex" alone means little. What do you expect if you type if the word sex only? It'a rather vague isn't it?

This example also demonstrates another concept "long tail" keywords or keywords with 2,3 or 4 words in it. People do use those more specific keywords to search hence if you are running a search engine marketing campaign (PPC or SEO), it's necessary to include both generic and specific keywords.

2. How's the "sex" trend is like in Vietnam?

To answer this question, i use Google Trends. It's a fairly simple tool. All you need to do is type in the topic that you want to research about, hit "Search Trend" and then customize the results to the territory/time duration that you want.

The result

A couple of things worth noticing from the above result:

• The trend is going up but marginally from 2004 - 2009. It shows that while Vietnamese started searching for sex early on, over time people don't tend to search for sex that often anymore. 
• To put things into perspective, in 2004 Vietnam only had around 5.5 million internet users. By 2009, we have 21 million users, 4 times the 2004 number and we don't see a 4 time increase in the search volume for "sex"
• Every year there seems to be a huge spike in January or February in terms of search volume for sex. One can speculate that Vietnamese search for sex more often at the beginning of the year? during Chinese New Year period? 
• The trend for 2007 is unique compared to all other years since we saw a huge spike in Oct/mid Nov

Tracing back the timeline realizing that the spike in Oct 2007 was due to the "release" of the "sex tape" of "Vang Anh" in Vietnam. The whole country went "crazy" about it for at least 1-2 months. Overseas newspaper like the Straight Times in Singapore reported about the scandal as well hence the search volume for "sex" during this period jumped 3 times the normal benchmark.

3. How Vietnamese rank compared to other countries in searching for sex?

• My initial assumption is that in countries with lots of internet users like China, Japan, India, South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines in Asia, Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, Turkey in Europe etc... may search for "sex" in their local languages hence the Vietnamese ranking is to high for the word "sex" on Google. 

Below are search volumes from various countries for the word "sex" in English and local language

I also upload the original excel file to Google docs in case any of you want to take a closer look

How people search for sex in December 2009

From the table above, we can see that Vietnamese don't rank first :D from both absolute volume point of view and the sex/internet users ratio. 

I calculate that ratio to show that for some countries the volume of searches for sex is big due to their large number of internet users. 

I don't know Chinese, Korean, Russian etc... so i use Google translator. Some of the search terms mentioned above may not be correct because of that. 

• Secondly, Google may not be the dominant search engine (with more than 80% market share) in all of the countries. We all know that Baidu is more popular in China compared to Google, Naver is the most popular search engine in Korea or Yandex is used more often in Russia. (for more information on search engine market share update)

What it means is that since we don't have the exact search volume for sex on those engines, we can't conclude that Vietnamese search for sex the most in the world. 

Data from Korea, China, Japan and South Korea clearly prove this. 

4. User search behavior is highly localized.

I briefly touched on the concept of user local user search behavior above by mentioning the fact that the word "sex" alone is too vague. The intention of searchers behind that word alone is unclear. Only 6.1 million out of 45 million is the exact word "sex". In other words, Vietnamese don't just blindly type into Google the word "sex" but they have more specific goals in mind when they search. Hence they search for longer phrase 80% of the time. 

How about other topic related to sex? I leave you to interpret the data below on your own :)

  

In conclusion, Vietnam is not number one in the world when it comes to searching for sex!

We don't make it to the top in terms of volume nor ratio of searches for sex/the number of internet user.

The second point is don't believe whatever the newspaper says and do your own investigation. :D

Data analysis requires a certain level of expertise and it's ALL about building the context behind the numbers. 

Lastly, i hope you all have some fun reading the above post. Any comments as per usual, can be sent to chandlerblog@gmail.com

Cheers, 

Chandler

A review of Google & Yahoo in 2009

How have Google and Yahoo performed in the search marketing space in Southeast Asia this year? Read on to find out.

This is my latest article published on iMediaConnection. I didn't venture out to other marketing channels but rather focusing on Google and Yahoo only.
They both make meaningful advancement in 2009, especially Google.

To read more about Google & Yahoo in 2009.

Affiliate Marketing in Vietnam and SouthEast Asia

I am just back from an interesting meeting with a London based VC in Ha Noi. We talked about lots of things but Affiliate marketing is one of them.
It reminds me about the fact that i haven't been covering this topic for quite a while now hence today's post.

For the benefits of those who don't know, i will start with "Affiliate marketing" concept and then move to the current state of Affiliate marketing in Vietnam or even in SouthEast Asia.

1. What is affiliate marketing?

It's obvious that one can google affiliate marketing and find this definition from Wiki "Affiliate marketing"

If it contains too many big words and too complicated to understand here is an example:

Imagine you have Vietnam Airline or Samsung Vietnam on the right-hand side and end consumers on the left-hand side.
At the moment, Vietnam Airline or Samsung or other companies are paying their distribution networks (their agents if you will) a certain percentage every time the agent sells a ticket or a mobile phone for them.
Depending on the size and the monthly volume of this agent, the commission can be 5%, 10% or 15%

Another simpler example is when you pay your sales team commission every time they sell a product/service for you. Everyone is doing this OFFLINE.

Now taking this model ONLINE, instead of an OFFLINE distribution network/sales team, Vietnam Airlines or Samsung will pay online publishers/website owners a certain amount of commission every time they sell an air plane ticket or a phone by displaying the ad on their site. This can be a percentage deal (5-10% of the basket value) or a fixed amount for each item ($10/sales) etc...

The question is then how publishers or website owners convince their readers/visitors to buy an air ticket or a mobile phone on their site?
Does that mean their website is e-commerce enabled?

The answer is NO. Publishers only need to display a banner, a text link or the like on their site, customers while visiting their site may click on the ad. Once they click on that ad, they will be redirected to the advertisers' site (Vietnam Airlines or Samsung in this case) and they can buy there.
The beauty of this is that Advertisers do NOT need to care about how Publishers convince their visitors to buy a product through an ads on their site (may be the publishers offer some product reviews?). Of course any illegal methods are to be prevented and they will be discussed in part 3 below.

2. What are the advantages of Affiliate marketing?

2.1 Virtually no risk

Since advertisers ONLY pay the affiliate when a sales occur, they don't have to worry about spending money on different marketing campaigns and hoping for the best.
In the offline world, it's the equivalent of companies only pay their sales agents if the agents sell any products/services without the basic salary or 100% commission structure.
Vietnam airlines won't have to worry about the fixed cost of renting an office space, hiring people to maintain the office and do selling.

2.2 Flexibility to define a desire action

Besides sales, there can be many other desire actions that a company may want like sales lead, customers who download software trials, whitepaper etc...
Basically advertiser just needs to decide which ONLINE actions they want the prospective customers to take when visiting their site; define how much each action is worth to them and how much they are willing to pay their extended sales arm to deliver that action.

2.3 Unlimited budget for Affiliate marketing

Since affiliate marketing works essentially like an extended sales arm for a company, it's a self serving "marketing" or sales initiative. The company doesn't have to take money from the marketing budget to fund for this, they can keep the marketing budget to do other things while affiliate marketing budget should be taken out of the sales budget.

However, since advertisers ONLY pay when they have VALIDATED sales/customers, they actually only need to take into consideration cash flow.

Since the budget should be unlimited or the whole concept of budgeting is not even applicable, advertisers can afford to run this program 24/7 until they have too many customers that they can't service.

2.4 Free exposure

Why free exposure? It's because when publishers/website owners run the banner ad for a certain product on their sites, if the customers don't click on the ads and buy, at least they see the ads, which means increase brand awareness for advertisers.
If they click on the ad, land on the advertiser site but don't buy anything, again free exposure for advertisers, increase brand awareness at NO COST.

3. Affiliate marketing in Vietnam or SouthEast Asia

At this point some of you may ask

"ok Chandler, that sounds good, actually too good. How come nobody in my industry is doing it?"
or "from my experience if it's too good to be true, it's often is"

Well the fact is Affiliate marketing is not that big in SouthEast Asia in general and virtually none in Vietnam in particular.

WHY?

3.1 Lack of clearly defined Online actions

Yup this reason comes at the top because if a company don't sell online, a bank which doesn't have an Online application form, or any other desired online action then they can't do affiliate marketing.
In some countries, especially in Vietnam, offline is still the main sales channel since the credit card adoption rate is low and e-commerce is still in infancy

For many companies, websites are just places for them to display information. If their customers want to buy or transact, they have to physically go to the branches.

3.2 Lack of understandings/red tape

This happens for every single new way of doing thing, every single industry so it's not a surprise. The whole online marketing concept is still relatively new in the region so that's why people are reluctant

3.3 Lack of trust, transparency and security

In order for Affiliate marketing to work, both advertiser sites and publishers' sites need to be tracked.
Why is it so?
This is to make sure that validated sales are being attributed back to the correct publisher. If the same consumer who visits multiple sites, clicks on multiple ads for the same product and only buy once, which publisher will get the credit/the sales.
Normally it's "last click win" meaning the last publisher's site before the customer makes the sales got the commission.

But there is another concern... Since advertisers only pay for actual sales/ validated sales, there will be a percentage of sales/conversions etc... are not valid/duplicate. These invalid sales/conversions will be ignored and publishers will lose revenue.
Can the advertisers be trusted enough to police their own work? What framework there is to make sure that they don't cheat especially if publishers are promoting the advertisers' products heavily using their own money??

Also tracking means putting a piece of code on advertiser site to collect information about the sales? How about security or even confidential information like customer name etc... Security risk is a very big hurdle for Affiliate marketing in SouthEast Asia or Vietnam.
Advertisers may not worry about confidential information like customer name being leaked out, but they worry about their own sales performance, the integrity of their site being compromised.

3.4 Consumer's behavior

This is not a problem for markets like Singapore but it's a big thing for markets like Vietnam.
In Vietnam people tends to buy/transact OFFLINE. They don't have the habit of buying things online or apply for credit cards/loans etc... online yet. They worry about security, their credit card/personal info being stolen.

Also not many companies have the mechanism in place, have enough information/help on their website yet to get the customer transact.

Consumer's behavior will lead to one thing: the lack of volume. No matter how great a marketing/sales channel is, the efforts being spent by personnel of a company need to be justified by sales volume driven, number of online applications driven.
Because realistically in order to maintain a affiliate marketing program, a company need to involve their IT team to support the set up, a dedicated person to keep track and validate sales/conversions, reporting, budgeting, etc...
The bigger the company, the more complicated the process is for them to get things moving. And all of this hard work for extra $200 worth of sales/month or 5 credit card applications/month.
Obviously this is a bit exaggeration from my part but you get the picture. The potential volume needs to be there to justify the efforts from advertisers' side.

"If something is not worth doing, it's not worth doing right!"

4. What next?

It's not my intention to provide an in-dept coverage on affiliate marketing with just one blog post. I hope all the basics are being covered roughly though.
It's my personal opinion / hope that affiliate marketing is here to stay and it will grow rapidly in the next 2-4 years. I don't see meaningful movements in the 12 months or so in Vietnam.
I can't say the same for Singapore, it may grow much faster because the infrastructure is there from consumers' preference to online transaction to technology, trust factor etc...

Industries that affiliate marketing may be big in this region are: finance (everything related to finance really), travel, consumer electronics, fashion, education etc...
As per usual, if you have anything to share/comment, feel free to email me at chandlerblog@gmail.com

Have a good night!
Chandler