Naver Search Ads for Brands Without a Korean Entity

Whether you need a Korean company: Not to start. Naver Search Ad requires a Korean business registration number on the advertiser account, so a foreign brand either runs through a certified agency arrangement, which takes about two weeks, or registers a branch or subsidiary itself, which takes three to four months and brings tax filing with it. We do the first. We tell you to do the second at around 40,000 EUR of monthly media, the point where holding your own account and settling directly stops being an administrative preference and becomes a control question. What Naver actually charges you for: Power Link and site search ads bid much as search ads bid elsewhere, with one difference that changes planning. Rank is bid multiplied by a quality index scored from one to ten, new keywords open at four, and moving that index takes roughly two weeks of real delivery. There is no bidding your way out of a low index in week one. Brand Search is not an auction at all: it is a fixed monthly fee calculated from the previous month's query volume on your brand terms, which means it gets more expensive precisely as your brand works, and it belongs in the plan as a defensive line rather than a growth one. Shopping Search Ads need a Smart Store or a product feed, and the feed is where most foreign brands stall. Keywords are not translated: Korean search language resists translation processes in ways that cost real money. A pet category is searched through several competing terms with different volumes and different buyer intent behind each, and the transliterated form of your brand may be the higher-volume query or may be the wrong one entirely. We build keyword sets from Naver's own keyword tool and DataLab, cross-checked against how the category is actually discussed, and the ad copy is written in Korean rather than adapted from your English. Measurement: Naver's Premium Log Analysis goes on the site before launch. Without it there is no conversion data inside the ad platform, and you end up reading a Google Analytics property that does not see Naver the way Naver sees itself. Where you sell through a Smart Store, the store statistics and the ad platform disagree by design, and we reconcile them monthly rather than declaring one of them correct. What we refuse: Blog and cafe seeding, reviewer campaigns, and anything else that manufactures the appearance of organic Korean opinion. It is adjacent work, it is routinely bundled with search advertising in this market, and it is not what we do. Also igaming, which is closed to private operators in Korea. Also prescription medicine advertising to the public, which is prohibited. Health functional food copy runs only after it has cleared the required pre-review, and we will not run a claim that is still waiting on one. Not included: No GFA display, no Shopping Live production, no Kakao. No website localisation, and no Smart Store build beyond specifying the feed the ads require. No Korean-language customer support for your inbound enquiries, which you will need and should staff before launch rather than after the first week of it. How the engagement runs: Build, then supervised delivery. Through the first eight weeks the quality index is still forming and the numbers are not yet evidence, so we report weekly and ask you not to take budget decisions from them. From week nine the account is readable and the monthly rhythm starts. Reporting is in English. Everything inside the account stays in Korean, because translating it back creates two versions of the truth.