A General Question and Answer about SEO and SEM beginners in Thai market -

Q: How should the prioritization of Thai vs. English keywords is done, while starting Search Engine Advertisement (Google Adwords)? Thai people search in English or Thai, when they are looking for a) brands, b) buying stuff online, etc.

A: Search Engine Advertisement - People search in both languages English and Thai and also they type in Thaingish (Thai + English). Hence it is better off seperating the accounts in multiple languages:

• Account 1: Language: Thai, Location: Thailand

• Thai Keywords only, (SQR to generate related search and add Thainglish (Thai + English) in this account).
• Site Links Thai
• Text Ad - Thai

• Account 2: Language: ALL minus Thai, Location:Thailand

• English Keywords only, target Expat and the English speaking Thai community.
• Thai AdText - Thai Keywords
• Mix Keywords - Thai AdText
• English AdText- English Keywords

Q: We are willing to have a monolingual site (only Thai). How should we built all the URLs?  English or in Thai

A: My suggestion is to go in English due to following reason:

• The same word could be written in different ways with different spellings, this will land us to 404 page as visitors would come up with their own grammar and spelling. In short there is no standardization.
• Bookmark, URL, Redirect, 301 redirect and also buying the URL in Advertisement would face difficulty hence let us keep it simple targeting Thai and Expat community.

However, if the website is going to be targeted only in multiple language separate the domain –

• Thai - .co.th
• English - .com

Q: In general, is there any search behavior guideline or benchmark over the traffic and language of the browser in Thailand?

A: Please see below -
Visit Estimation - (Based on Language they use - Language of Browser):

• Language    % Visit Estimate

• English        68.58%
• Thai        30.15%
• Others        1.28%

Origin Estimation - (Based on Location they are - Origin of User):

• Language    % Visit Estimate

• Thailand    97%
• Others        3%

Based on Search Behavior -
Search Terms        Type

• Thai

• Generic Products

• English

• Branded Products   

• Thai + English

• Purchase + Research

Q: How many e-mail addresses do you think we need until it makes sense to get started with newsletters? My opinion: I expect to be conversion 0.5% max., so to generate at least 10 orders from one newsletter campaign, we should have > 2,000 subscribers.

A: Clothing and Accessories Industry -

• EM-Open Rate = Approx. 8%
• EM-Click Rate = Approx. 2.7%
• Conversion Rate = Approx. 0.42%
• To Generate 10 Orders = Total Email Subscribers - Approx: 20,000

o    Note: Depends on total products being featured and Louis Vuition would convert more if the offline price is beatable.

Conversion rate across different industry for the month of March 2012. WK#12 vs. WK#11. Overall a -14% drop in email marketing while 8% growth in the general conversion which is mainly boosted by 11% growth all seen coming from New Visitors. This looks obvious that email had recorded the drop as the new visitors seems not yet targeted via email.

The table below will give a general guideline on the conversion rate across various industry. The data can be compared with 2010 (Conversion Rate 2010) we can expect in terms of that the conversion rate has increased. The global conversion rate is 2.80% vs. 2.30% which is 21% increase compared to 2010. While on the other end the Fashion industry has seen a -22% drop 1.70% vs. 2.20%.

Overall the one more important thing displayed below is the Repeat Visitor vs. New Visitor Conversion rate. The blog Why measure Pre-Click and Post-Click? will become very handy if we are going to measure the conversion performance.

Please see below the detail conversion rate - March 2012 (Source: Fireclick Index):