Among the largest advertising markets in the world, Japan ranks third, trailing only the United States and China. This means that search engine activities in Japan have become incredibly competitive–and can translate to big business for companies here in Japan. But to compete within this huge market and promote your company in the most effective ways, it’s imperative to be well-versed in the ins and outs of search engine advertising campaigns and knowing which types of campaigns on which search engines will produce the best results. The best place to start is to understand the major players in the search engine scene right now. In fact, there are only two search engines that currently account for more than 90% of searches conducted on any given day in Japan: Google and Yahoo! Japan.

While Yahoo! Japan dominated the search engine field in Japan in the early 2000s, Google has quickly overtaken the company in recent years. In fact, over the last twelve months, Google has only increased its lead ahead of Yahoo! Japan, and by a growing margin. Between October 2019 and October 2020, Google accounted for 77.27% of the overall share of online searches in Japan, far outperforming the second-place Yahoo! Japan, which accounted for 18.01% for the same time period. On desktop devices, Google’s lead was even higher, with its search share coming in at 79.69% and Yahoo! Japan falling back at only 12.48%. This is a huge change from only ten years ago, when Yahoo! Japan held a much greater share of daily search activities. Even on mobile devices within Japan, currently, Google accounts for nearly three-quarters of all search activity within Japan at 74.51% and Yahoo! Japan coming in second by a wide margin at 24.85%. Other search engines that are used much less frequently in Japan include Bing, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo.

Coupled with Google’s wild popularity and brand recognition, there are several factors that make it an attractive platform for running ad campaigns for your business. To begin with, Google offers businesses the flexibility of selecting from eight different types of ad formats, ranging from text-only ads, to video ads that can stand alone or be embedded in other videos, to product shopping ads that enable the audience to immediately click through to purchase the product they want. Google Ads also allows you to create up to 10,000 separate campaigns per account, which far surpasses Yahoo! Japan’s limit of only 100 campaigns per account. This allows our team to create numerous campaigns crafted in collaboration with your company’s decision makers. When combined with Google’s powerful search algorithm and ease of use, we can position your business’s products and services in front of a greater number of your target audience.