Google AdWords Qualified Individuals and a Company in Hungary

So once you have turned your attention to the Hungarian market, and become interested in how to target potential customers interested in your products or services in Hungary, you may also wish to know who are holding official qualifications from Google Inc.

If so, here goes a continually updated list on the SEM professionals who are probably confidently managing Google ad campaigns.

Google AdWords Qualified Individuals:

1. Laszlo Fazakas (holy squirrel, he’s my boss)
2. Mihaly Bobaly (great scubadiver, too)
3. Andras Szell (no extra info)
4. Anna Sebestyen (gee, that’s me!)
5. Eszter Vandor (team mate at Arcanian)

Google AdWords Qualified Company:

1. Arcanian Consulting (great, that’s the company I work for!)
2. no more yet.

The company is surely the first to be given this qualification in Hungary. Regionally (Eastern/ Central Europe), the first one seems to be Dobry web in the Czech Republic. As I couldn’t find any other companies entitled to the Google AdWords Qualified Company logo (checking Austria, Croatia, Slovakia, the Czech R., Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia etc.), I guess we take the silver medal. It is a guess, but a strong one. Do you happen to know about companies in the region with such qualifications? Please send me the links in this case (in comment, if it is more convenient).

Surely, the number of qualified Google professionals will steadily increase, and I hope to get info on who else to include in the list from Central Europe.

Note: last update on Jan 04 2006.

How many people use Google in Hungary? What about rivals?

According to Dennis Woodside, Google is used by 36% of the Hungarian web users (which is about 0,7-1 m users out of the 2-3 m Hungarian netizens, out of the 10 m people), in contrast to Poland where more than 80% of netizens use Google. The uneven distribution of Google’s popularity in Central and Eastern Europe should not come as a surprise at all: if local initiatives, national search engines are satisfying enough (and function as a multifaceted, one-off portal for the users in the given country, mostly ex-soviet block nations), they are more favored than Google (see the Czech), so Google Inc. needs to wait and use tactics adapted to local circumstances.
Right after google.hu, the second most popular ‘search engine’ (basically a catalog) in Hungary is Startlap (Starting page, literally) with 27% of the search volume pie, says Dennis.

Now the question arises: what does Dennis, or rather Google stats mean by the Startlap 27%?

If you open the catalog on startlap.hu, you can clearly see that Startlap uses two search engines, one called Tango (Hungarian development of Startlap in cooperation with Etarget) and the other one called Google.

So it would be good to know how much of the 27% belongs to Google again. All the more as Startlap, as the main competitor of Google in the Hungarian search business, is gaining revenue by selling Google ads on its pages (search for AdSense) with the wide blue stripe and orange starlet of Startlap catalog.

I am in really two minds about this issue: is it better for Startlap, which thus can generate more income for the site while providing better search results under its own logo by taking advantage of the Google algorithm, or is it better for Google by drilling into the Startlap empire and winning over ‘amateur users’ for Google? (by ‘amateur users’ I mean Hungarian internet users who are less tech savvy, and who tend to have Startlap as their default front page, plus their main search source)

I do not think that two market players consciously act like this, or have sized up the pros and cons of such a fused appearance as seen above. If so, Dennis would have mentioned this, or the director of Startlap at the Internet Hungary conference (Oct 2006), or any of my professional acquaintances in the SEM industry (as Hungary is so small that gossip travels faster than some downloaded files).

But these are all assumptions. I’ll forward this blogpost to Dennis, and we will see how he reacts. Of course, I will kindly ask Startlap’s representatives on this slightly confusing issue, too.

Let me know if you experience similar semi-fused solutions in other (emerging) countries, please.