February 11, 2004

Google has launched a Chinese-language version of AdWords in a bid to further extend its search-based advertising network and attract new advertisers.

The search giant said AdWords now enables customers to create keyword ad campaigns in both simplified and traditional Chinese text.

The move should enable it to win more customers in the rapidly growing Chinese-language internet market and is part of the company's strategy to make the AdWords service as easy to use as possible.

Google wandered into controversy when it first targeted the Chinese market after acceding to the Chinese government's demands to censor content.

The company already has "hundreds" of customers running ads in Chinese, but they have had to sign up via AdWords English-language interface.

It has also begun to accept payment in Hong Kong dollars and Singapore dollars to make AdWords more attractive to advertisers in the region.

Google's AdWords program, which has over 150,000 advertisers participating, now supports 16 languages, including Japanese, Korean and all the major European languages, in more than 180 countries.

The launch comes several weeks after Google revealed that it is opening a European engineering centre in Switzerland that it said would focus on improving its language-specific offerings "in ways that will benefit all of it global services".

In December, the company also extended the reach of its AdSense contextual advertising program aimed at website publishers by adding five new foreign language interfaces.

Source: Net Imperative

        

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