Google contextual advertising in Singapore

Singapore is a small city-state located in Southeast Asia. It has a relatively small population, but one of the highest GDP per capita in the world – 103,181 US dollars (3rd place in the world as of 2019).

The absence of corruption, a skilled workforce, well-thought-out infrastructure and loyal legislation have attracted more than 3,000 multinational corporations to the country, headquartered in Singapore. Thanks to these factors, doing business and attracting the target audience with the help of contextual advertising in Singapore can bring very good financial results.

What to consider when setting up contextual advertising in Singapore?

Setting up and maintaining contextual advertising in Singapore has its own characteristics, which are determined by local customs, cultural characteristics and the nuances of doing business in this country.

Language targeting

The official languages in Singapore are English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil. Since Singapore is a multinational country, choose the language settings for your advertising campaign based on your target audience. As a general rule, it is better to set up a Google Ads advertising account in at least two languages, one of the local languages and English. Thus, you can get the most solvent audience – tourists who come to the country both for recreation and for business purposes.

It is important to understand that setting up and maintaining advertising campaigns in different languages is equivalent to maintaining two separate projects in the Google Ads account. This increases the workload of the marketing agency, and, accordingly, the cost of running an advertising campaign for the client.

Geo targeting

The population density in Singapore is one of the highest in the world, 7810 people per square kilometer (2nd place in the world). Therefore, when setting up targeting for an advertising campaign, focus no longer on geographic location, but on highlighting the portrait of the target audience in other ways: language, age, gender, income level. This way, you can allocate your advertising budget more efficiently.

The high cost of advertising in Google AdWords

Since the standard of living in Singapore is one of the highest in the world, and doing business in the country can bring huge profits to the company, the competition in the Google Ads auction is very high, and the cost per click in some topics requires us to pay more attention to advertising campaigns.

That’s why it’s important to focus on advertising tools that will bring maximum results:

1. Search ads. They bring in the hottest customers who are ready to place an order (with the right setup). Be sure to separate your keywords into different groups. Separately highlight requests in the identified need, as well as with geo-referencing – they will attract the largest number of conversions. Competitor query group requires special attention – it will help to divert potential customers from your competitors at the very bottom of the sales funnel.
2. Remarketing. If in your business, a customer can make a purchase decision for a long time, be sure to set up remarketing campaigns. At the same time, take into account the average time from the first touch to the conclusion of the transaction, the margin of goods or services, the allowable cost per conversion, to make a decision to launch Google Ads remarketing. This will allow us to draw up terms of reference for collecting lists of various audiences that come to the site for multi-level remarketing, understand the decision-making cycle for each of the audiences, and ultimately understand what message to show in an ad at one or another level of the sales funnel.
3. Shopping ads. Google Shopping allows you to get a cheaper (sometimes 2 times) conversion rate for online stores. If you are selling goods for B2C clients, be sure to try this tool. Google puts forward a number of requirements for the formation of a merchant feed, violating which you risk getting an account ban in the Merchant Center, so if you have no experience in setting up such advertising, it is better to order a one-time feed setup from a marketing agency or study the official documentation.
4. Performance Max. This is a new type of advertising campaign that is already showing good results. It allows you to use all Google Ads traffic channels (Shopping campaigns, Display Network, YouTube, etc.) within one campaign. Due to this, the lead is usually obtained cheaper than in other campaigns, and the efficiency is higher. However, Performance Max performance is not the same for different topics, so such ads need to be tested for each specific niche.

Cost of setting up contextual advertising in Singapore

The cost of setting up Google Ads in Singapore will depend on who is running the campaign, as well as the advertising tools used:

• Self-configuration. In this case, you pay only for traffic from Google AdWords, you perform the setup work yourself. Only your time for training and project management is evaluated. You will benefit from our free video tutorials on our YouTube channel and how-to articles on our blog. If you wish, you can use a paid video consultation from our PPC specialist. To do this, leave a request on our website.
• Setting up Google Shopping and Performance Max campaigns. It is performed once and does not require constant support. After the initial debugging, you pay only for advertising traffic. The services of a specialist will be required only at the first stage. Then the system does everything automatically.
• Search and banner ads. Requires constant support of the project from a specialist. The final cost will depend on the region where the advertisement is placed, the number of languages in the project, the number of categories of goods/services launched in the advertisement, the number of tools in the service package, and the number of portraits of the target audience. After your application and our brief communication with you, we will be able to recommend one of our service packages and quote the exact price.

Google Ads traffic price for Singapore

The overall price of contextual advertising in Singapore is particularly affected by the high cost per click in this country. You can predict the cost per click using the Google Ads Keyword Planner. Below is the cost per click for popular lines of business:

• washing machine repair – $0.82;
• ventilation cleaning – $0.77;
• Plumbing services – $0.84;
• beauty salons (manicure) – $0.73;
• carpet cleaning – $0.71;
• permanent makeup – $0.80;
• dentist – $0.78;
• refrigerators – $0.78;
• Korean cosmetics – $0.61;
• shelves for cats – $1.78;
• dog food – $1.03;
• fertilizer for flowers – $0.86.

Attention! It is important to consider here that the average cost of a click within an account can vary by 40%, both up and down, because it is influenced by many parameters. A well-configured and maintained project allows you to get more leads and sales at a lower cost, covering a larger share of impressions for your target audience.

Peculiarities of online advertising market in Singapore

Singapore has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world. 5.83 million people live here, of which 4.92 are active Internet users. About 93% of local residents use the Internet every day – on average, they spend about seven hours daily online.

The online commerce market is constantly developing here – in 2020 alone, the number of online purchases increased by 32%. About 4 million Singaporeans regularly order goods and services on the Internet, which is approximately 70% of all residents of the country. Orders are most frequently placed using desktops and laptops (62%), followed by mobile devices (35%) and tablets (3% in total).

Among the search engines in Singapore, Google is the undisputed leader – it is trusted by 95.69% of Singaporeans. The second and third places are occupied by Bing with its share of 2.15% of the total search traffic and Yahoo!, which is used by 1.31% of local residents. The remaining search engines are not particularly popular in the country – they account for less than 1% of all Internet users.