The Search Monitor’s New Release: South Korea’s Naver Search Engine

November 11, 2015

The Search Monitor is excited to add South Korea’s Naver, one of the world’s leading search engines, to its list of monitored media. This list includes Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, Baidu (China), Yandex (Russia), and the PriceGrabber and ShopZilla shopping engines. Naver was started in 1999 to provide more relevant Korean-language results for South Korea’s consumers. And 16 years later, it is still the king of the market, with 50% market share compared to Google’s 37% share. After these two giants, the next biggest search engines only have single-digit market share. South Korea is one of just three countries where Google does not dominate the search market, the others being China and Russia. Naver’s success comes from many unique SERP features, including:

• Up-to-date trends on the homepage
• Public opinion voting next to certain search results (likes/dislikes help searchers choose)
• Showing related keywords next to search results
• Posting user-submitted cartoons and web novels
• Search results from multiple sources (e.g., ads, blogs, e-commerce) in one place

South Korea: An Attractive Market For Search Advertisers

The South Korea search market has become incredibly attractive to search advertisers outside of the country. First, the online audience is huge, with more than 84% of the country’s 50 million residents having Internet access. And second, the economy is a retail powerhouse. eMarketer predicts that retail e-commerce sales will reach $36 billion in 2015, making it the 3rd largest market in Asia-Pacific, and the 7th largest worldwide.

What’s Monitored on Naver

Affiliate Marketers and Brand Managers can find compliance issues in paid search, such as:

• Affiliate violations (e.g., URL hijacking, rank restrictions, and TM bidding)
• Trademark violations
• New affiliates

Search Advertisers can learn paid search insights such as:

• Number of advertisers (i.e. level of competition)
• Market share leaders and fast-movers
• Ad rank
• Ad copy, including special offers
• Other metrics for keyword analysis

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Learn how advertisers are taking advantage of the Naver Search Engine and the results they’re getting.

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