Google En Espanol

By Alicia Whitehouse, Associate Director, Search

According to comScore, "Hispanic online population reached a record 20.3 million visitors in February 2009, representing 11 percent of the total U.S. online market. During the past year, the growth of the U.S. Hispanic Internet audience outpaced that of the total U.S. online population in terms of number of visitors, time spent and pages consumed."

The Hispanic market is growing, providing new opportunities and avenues to reach targeted demographics.

We had a chance to dip into this growing market last quarter, when we ran a relatively small music search campaign for a Latin artist selling his new album. It's actually quite challenging to run any type of music search campaign since Google and Yahoo have partnerships with iLike (MySpace) and Rhapsody to feed top songs directly within the SERPs (see example for Lady Gaga). Having a paid ad next to these top two organic listings has been pretty difficult in terms of achieving a favorable quality score and click rate.

Due to our limited budget, we normally only target the US market with keywords in the English language on Google, Yahoo, and sometimes Bing. It's a straight forward campaign with targeted keywords to the artist, album, songs, and the appropriate music genre (for the Latin campaign, we added "latin music" keywords).

After a couple days of low delivery, we decided to switch up our campaign and target Google US searchers who prefer to search in the Spanish language. We translated our top keywords and copy into Spanish (those Spanish classes in high school finally paid off!) and ran a test for Google US only. Ah-hah! Our small test turned out to be our top performing keyword group for the entire campaign.

• Click-through-rate was 178% higher on the Spanish campaign compared to all other ad groups.
• Average cost-per-click was $0.40.
• Spanish keywords contributed to 25% of the overall clicks and cost.

This proved to be a very successful test. However, it was almost a no-brainer. Since it was a Latin artist, of course there would be Hispanic following and plenty of search volume around those keywords.

There are some other tactics we want to consider for our next test, including:

• Using Spanish keywords but English copy
• Incorporating some "Spanglish" keywords and copy
• Targeting specific regions within the US
• Targeting outside of the US if budget permits
• Testing the Yahoo/Bing Hispanic market
• Landing pages in Spanish and conversion rates
• Separate out mobile device targeting within Google

The true test will be non-Latin artist targeting the Hispanic market within the US. I thought this article was interesting from SearchEngineLand.com.

The mobile space is also growing exponentially - 87% of English-speaking Hispanics own a mobile phone. Their behavior is slightly different from non-Hispanic white users as well.

• 46% of Hispanics access the internet compared to 38% of the non-Hispanic white population.
• 52% play music compared to 33% of non-Hispanic whites (which is probably why our campaign did so well)
• 51% play games compared to 34% of non-Hispanic whites

Take these insights into consideration when addressing your next target demographics, you never know what search could show you!