Yahoo! JAPAN Search Ads Account Build and Management

About one in eight Japanese searches happens on Yahoo! JAPAN, and not one of them can be bought from a Google Ads account. Yahoo has licensed Google's search index since 2010 but sells its own inventory through LY Corporation, on a separate auction, with an editorial team that reads every ad and every landing page by hand. This engagement opens and runs that account for developer tool and medical device companies entering Japan. Why a translated keyword list fails here: A Japanese buyer writes one concept four ways, and the match types do not bridge them. The kanji form, the katakana form and the romaji form are three keywords, not one, and the same term typed in full-width alphanumerics is a fourth. Broad match catches part of this and drags in a neighbouring category with it. I build the form set for each concept from query data and from how Japanese engineers and hospital procurement staff actually type, then write the negatives that the katakana spellings pull in. This decides the account, and it happens before any bid is set. Review, and the Pharmaceutical and Medical Device Act: For anything medical the binding constraint is the Act on Securing Quality, Efficacy and Safety. A claim that clears in Germany or the United States fails here if it goes past the approved indication, and the reviewer reads the landing page, not only the ad text. First-pass review runs three to five business days; regulated copy usually takes a second round. I write the Japanese copy against the approved indication text you supply, and I tell you which claims will not clear before they are queued rather than after a fortnight of rejections. How it is run after launch: Manual CPC while the account is thin, because auto-bidding on a few hundred clicks a month fits noise. Quicklinks and callouts written per ad group rather than at account level, since Japanese character counts do not survive a paste from English. Query mining every second week, structural review at week four and week twelve. You get a written read at each of those points and nothing in between, because there is nothing honest to say in between. Not included: Yahoo Display Ads, LINE advertising, Yahoo Shopping. No translation or construction of your Japanese site. I will tell you what the landing page has to say to clear review; your team writes it. No Google Japan work either. If you want both engines managed by one person, I am the wrong person for the pair. Who should not buy this: Companies without a Japanese-language landing page and without somebody who can answer a Japanese-language enquiry inside a business day. Review is not the hard part of entering Japan. Being unreachable after the click is. Also not for anyone wanting a thirty-day market test: account opening needs a Japanese entity or an authorised sales partner and JPY billing before a single ad is queued, and the first review round lands after that. Ninety days is the shortest period that tells you anything. What you are actually paying for: The decision about which query forms carry commercial intent in a language where the writing system itself splits the market, and the judgement about which of your claims survive a regulator who reads more carefully than the platforms you are used to. The build is a week of that decision written into an interface.