PPC comparison: Naver vs. Daum

5 min readDec 30, 2017

Want to promote your company in Korea? There are two portals, Naver and Daum that are both very popular. Many people use them daily for shopping, to read emails, news, find info about real estate and browse their social networks (Naver or Daum Cafe). To start a digital marketing campaign, I will give an overview of advertising in both of them. This article consists of three parts:

What are the most used websites / apps in Korea
Background info about Naver and Kakao (the holding company of both Daum and messaging app KakaoTalk)
A comparison of Naver and Daum pay per click (PPC) online advertising systems

For more info about advertising in Korea / Naver, go to eBook and download the eBook and media kits.

So, what are the most popular websites in Korea (November / December 2017)? According to three different sources, we get three different results! (Follow the link for an earlier blog post about Korean search portals.)

Note: Unlike Alexa, Similarweb does not add statistics from subdomains (like news.naver.com, sports.naver.com, shopping.naver.com etc.) to top-level domain Naver.com. Alexa, Similarweb and Nielsen Koreanclick all make the distinction between google.com and google.co.kr.

Below are the numbers from Nielsen Koreaclick, data is from November 2017:

Note: “Google” traffic is from both google.com and google.co.kr. In a chart, the data looks like this:

Note: the blue part of the column represents the number of unique visitors on PC, while the red part of the column represents the number of unique visitors on mobile. According to Nielsen Koreaclick, the three most popular websites in Korea for searching the web are Naver, Daum and Google. Google may have more unique visitors, people spend more time on Daum and it has more pageviews. (The demographic that uses Daum is older.)

PC

Source: Nielsen Koreaclick

Mobile

Source: Nielsen Koreaclick

Why this discrepancy between PC and mobile? This may have to do with the fact that Google is the default search engine on many smartphones (Chrome).

“Advertising accounted for 73% of Naver’s total sales” for Q2 in 2017. It saw a “solid gain” in mobile ad revenue. It takes almost 20% of all e-commerce revenue in Korea, thanks to the diversity of its shopping channels and user friendly online payment system (Naver Pay). In Q3 this year growth in overseas sales (mostly by messaging app Line and mobile ads) increased earnings for Naver.

For Kakao, 36.5% of its sales consists of ad revenue (534 billion won, 2016). Mobile games and music content are its fastest growing business units (702 billion won). Kakao also owns one of Korea’s few Internet only banks (Kakao Bank) and a cryptocurrency exchange (Upbit). (Follow the link for a more detailed profile of Kakao.) Both Naver TV and Kakao TV are making efforts to capture market share from YouTube in Korea. Through YouTube, Google gets a lot of ad revenue while Naver leads in PC and mobile ads.

There are already many articles about Naver PPC (official name: Search Ad) and the differences between Google AdWords and Naver Search Ad. Therefore, this blog post is about the differences between Naver and Daum PPC. Follow the link for an introduction of Naver Search Ad in English. The categories that I compare Naver and Daum with are: ads, simple settings, advanced settings, features and ad extensions. Images of the ad extensions and examples of brand search are at the end of this blog post.

Medium didn’t import the tables, look for the tables here: https://www.nitaro.net/2017/12/ppc-comparison-naver-vs-daum/