While Google dominates the search market of South Eastern Europe, it has never had a real presence here. Until now. Google just announced its official presence in Croatia, from where it will run all operations for the rest of the region, including Serbia, Albania, and beyond.
Internet marketing, especially search engine marketing, is still in its infancy in the region. Leading local web portals, such as Index and B92, still account for a lion’s share of the internet marketing investments. Google’s AdWords programme has only recently become popular among advertisers in the region, although campaigns are frequently mismanaged.
A rising number of AdWords-certified individuals and companies are slowly changing this. As far as competition on the pay-per-click front is concerned, Google can count on Facebook’s internal ads, as well as regional systems such as eTarget.
Hrabren Suknaic, Google’s regional manager for the Adriatic region says their main concern is raising awareness about the importance of search among Croatian and regional companies. While companies in South Eastern Europe are well aware of Google, few US-based internet companies have a true presence in the region.
Google’s move has been welcomed by web professionals in the region. Now we just have to see how serious Suknaic and his team really are.
Congrats google!… me waiting for the day when you guys to finally headquarter at Antartica
http://latticepurple.com
Serbia and Montenegro are separate states since 2006 FYI… the map is a bit out of date
Good move.
Actually the internet market there (here) is extremely well developed. At the same time they are already seeing a huge usage of google ads, much much higher than in Slovenia for example.
Pressed the enter too fast. :S
anyhow, this is no big surprise. Croatia is well developed, has extremely well universities, speaks the current “unofficial” that used to be official language of the region. Basically they can easily cover 20 mil + population.
And it is cheaper then Slovenia. Plus with the economic downturn, good engineers will be easier to find.
makes complete sense to me.
how wonderful google is going to own planets on day watch!!!