Yahoo! JAPAN Search Ads Run From Inside the Japanese Auction

Yahoo! JAPAN carries roughly a fifth of search sessions in Japan, and most of the accounts handed to us there began life as an export of a Google Ads campaign with the keyword column translated. Such an account runs two or three quarters without anyone calling it a failure, because it spends against queries a translator produced rather than the ones people in Japan type. How the account gets built: Keyword sets come from Japanese query data and from the search terms already reaching your site, never from the Google account. Japanese is written without spaces between words, so segmentation happens inside Yahoo's matching layer and phrase match behaves in ways the interface does not describe. Product and category terms are built in kanji, hiragana, katakana and Latin script, with half-width and full-width variants wherever the brand name is alphanumeric. On every account we have run, the negative list ends longer than the keyword list, and that is where most of the first quarter's work goes. Review, and what it costs you: Yahoo's review sits closer to three business days than to Google's minutes, and it applies the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Act, yakkihou, to wording that passes untouched elsewhere. For sports nutrition, recovery products and anything applied to the body, claims are rewritten before submission rather than after rejection, because a rejected ad costs a week rather than an afternoon. Copy testing is planned a month at a time for the same reason. If your legal team will not move on a claim, we would rather establish that before the account opens than after. Bidding and measurement: Yahoo's automated bidding wants conversion volume that a brand entering Japan rarely has in its first two quarters. Until it exists, bids are set by hand, reviewed weekly, and shaped to Japan Standard Time instead of inheriting a European day-part curve. Measurement runs on the site general tag and conversion tags, reconciled against your own analytics monthly. Where the two disagree we report both numbers rather than the flattering one, and we say which we are acting on. The first sixty days: Weeks one to three are structure, script variants and negative build. Weeks four to six are review cycles and the first honest query harvest. Nothing about the account is worth judging before day sixty, which is why we do not offer a trial month here: the review cadence alone eats it. Not included: Yahoo! JAPAN Display, including search keyword targeting inside display, is separate work and we do not bundle it. We do not write or translate Japanese landing pages, we do not run LINE Ads, and we handle only the technical sections of account opening under the LY Corporation agency structure, not your paperwork. Who should not buy this: Brands without a Japanese-language checkout, a JPY price and a domestic returns address. Yahoo will send qualified traffic straight into whichever of those is missing. Brands who want Japan folded into a blended global cost per acquisition, because that number will conceal what this account is doing for at least two quarters and you will switch it off for the wrong reason. And anyone whose Japanese ambitions rest on one hero product with no local review presence, where paid search is the wrong first move and we will say so. Reporting: Monthly, in English or Italian, one page of what changed, what it cost and what we would stop, with query-level detail attached for anyone who wants to check the reasoning.