In general, the reason Baidu PPC advertising can be highly effective is the fact that users who are actively searching for something already have a buying intent. It means that they are more likely to convert, in other words to become the actual customers compared to those who are passively looking at ads or are still in the process of discovery of a specific product or service.

Baidu PPC advertising is, in principal, identical to Google’s equivalent, although there are several important differences to keep in mind. First of all, due to the fact that Chinese internet is tightly controlled and regulated by the government, opening a PPC account is, by far, more complicated process than with Google.

In contrast to Google AdWords account which is free and only asks for a Gmail account and a credit card, Baidu requires some serious paperwork, a fee and a deposit to get it going.

Currently, only legally registered companies, domestic or foreign, can advertise with Baidu. Obviously, opening Baidu PPC advertising account for a Chinese company is much easier than for a foreign one, it is also cheaper and faster. Overseas business entities are required to provide business registration certificate at the minimum and are often asked to submit additional documentation. This is why it is recommended to enlist a help of professionals who are experienced in dealing with Baidu on behalf of a foreign company.

Once the account has been registered and activated, it operates in a similar way with Google, although the back end interface is entirely in Chinese. In addition, the structure is significantly more confusing and takes some time getting used to. Once again, even if you are fluent in Chinese, it is always a good idea to outsource Baidu account management to someone who is well familiar with it instead of attempting to do it yourself.

Baidu PPC advertising with search ads

On the most basic level, there are two sections in Baidu account: search ads and display ads. Search ads are those that are displayed on search results pages in response to user query. In Baidu, they come in a few different formats.

The most basic format is a text ad complete with a title, two lines of description and URL at the bottom – quite similar to Google. There is also a verification level assigned to an ad which is designed to inform users on trustworthiness of a particular website and an advertiser.

Some text ads can also include additional links to separate landing pages. By offering several options, such arrangement increases likelihood of that ad being clicked, although this format is more expensive.

Baidu brand zone

Baidu Brand Zone is another option that is most suitable for businesses looking to build brand awareness rather than achieve direct conversions. This type of ads typically include images, text and multiple links. Such ads are CPM (cost per mille/1000 impressions) based and therefore harder to measure. The price for such ads depends on their size and the position making the advertising in Baidu Brand Zone to be the most expensive type of Baidu marketing.

Using images with Baidu PPC advertising

In general, in order to increase the CTR (click through rate) advertisers would try to include images in the ads whenever possible as well pack more links into an ad. Carefully designed text that fits well with dynamic keywords (those that show up in response to the relevant query) is another important factor to consider. This is where A/B split tests come handy and, fortunately, Baidu offers unlimited ways to test and fine tune the best performing combinations.

Another good reason to include images with the ads is the fact that more users, especially on mobile, use pictures to search for products. Baidu’s picture matching algorithms continue improving offering more opportunities to display matching ads.

Baidu PPC advertising for mobile

Mobile search is another major area of Baidu strength where it holds even larger market share than on desktops. Optimizing ads for mobile involves setting up a call button that dials the number automatically by user simply tapping it from their phones. It works in both mobile browser and Baidu app.

If the business is particularly interested in reaching mobile users, it is worth investing in creating mobile friendly ads with suitable images and shorter, more concise text.

Baidu display ads

Display ads is the second major method to advertise with Baidu. It involves placing image ads (banners) at the most relevant sites that are part of vast Baidu ads display network. This is what is often called remarketing (or retargeting) – the ads are displayed based on a specific user’s history of visiting sites or searching for a particular term.

Technically, it is identical to a much larger Google’s ads display network, which, like many other things, has been copied by Baidu.
Both search ads and display ads are managed within the same Baidu PPC account sharing advertising budget that can be split between the two methods.

Typically, it is hard to predict in advance which PPC method would bring better results, therefore you should expect it to take some time to determine how to best allocate the budget between search and display ads.

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What is Baidu Zhidao

Baidu Zhidao (百度知道) literally means Baidu Knows is a Chinese language collaborative Web-based collective intelligence by question and answer which is built and run by Baidu. Like Baidu itself, it relies on self-censorship in order to keep in line with government regulations. It uses user-generated content and is moderated by platform administrators. Any content related to pornography, commercial advertisements, or direct personal attacks are routinely removed.

The test version was launched on June 21, 2005, and turned into release version on November 8, 2005. In essence, Baidu Zhidao is a question-and-answer-based platform, similar to Quora or it’s ugly cousin – Yahoo answers.

A registered user asks a question in which other members are promoted to give answers using credits as a reward. In the meantime, these answers focus on the search result of the same or relevant questions. That is how knowledge is collected and shared.

Question and answer together with the search engine makes it possible for a member to be a producer and a consumer of knowledge, which is often referred to collective intelligence.

Unlike Baidu Baike, the entries in Baidu Zhidao can be manipulated much easier. Large number of entries are questions and answers often created by the same person using multiple accounts. The platform also often turns to a battleground between brands. It is often too easy to damage competitors’ reputation by posting negative content about their specific brand or product.

Baidu Zhidao Marketing Options

First step in marketing with Baidu Zhidao is to research what type questions, that are relevant to your company, have already been asked or answered on the platform. Then you should try to provide the most objective and informative answer with the goal to get upvoted and ranked higher.

Needless to say, it is never a good idea to disclose the fact that the answerer may be associated with that particular company. Obviously, answers from non-biased participants would enjoy greater degree of trust compared to “corporate” ones.

Just like with Baidu Baike, marketing with Baidu Zhidao can also involve Baidu display ads. While there is no guarantee that your ad will show up for relevant search terms, it is still important to update the setting in Baidu Tuiguang (Baidu Adwords) account and adjust the bidding to maximize those chances.

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Being the largest search engine in China, Baidu keyword research should be the one to start with. Currently, Baidu offers Baidu Index tool that is free for Baidu advertising accounts, offering some basic information to users.

Here is an example of searching for keyword “iPhone8” (most Chinese users would typically type in “iPhone8” without space between the two words).

First, Baidu Index would match it with a keyword in the database before displaying the data. This means that for some rare keywords or those with low search volumes, this tool may not show any results. For those cases, a more powerful keyword research tool within Baidu advertising account must be used.

The top section shows the numbers for search volumes on PC (25,999) and mobile (20,070). It is remarkable to note that the overall search volume for this particular term is only 20% larger on PC vs. mobile.

Some points on the graph are also marked with letters: A, B, C, D etc. Those can be linked to a particular events such as mentions in media. Viewing the relevant content can give a researcher further insight on what was behind peaks and valleys of the chart.

Next, Baidu Index shows some more data on related keywords and how they are related to the original one in a key phrase (sometimes called long tail keyword). The size of the bubble illustrates the search volume and the color – the relative position.

Manipulating the slider allows viewing snapshots of the related keywords at different time periods. It can also help getting an idea on how the searches were changing over time.

The data is further detailed in the list of top related keywords that come before or after this specific keyword. This panel also lists the sites that have received most hits as a result of this keyword search:

Unsurprisingly, the most common key phrase was about the timing of iPhone 8 release.

Next graph specifically focuses on media mentions of the keyword. From here, user can view the actual article. This helps figuring out which type of news helped driving more searches and which had little to no effect.

The following series of data focuses on the audience. The map below illustrates search volume distribution by province. From here, the data can be further drilled down to the levels of area and city.

Finally, the audience is broken down by age distribution and gender. According to Baidu, iPhone 8 was mostly searched by males between ages of 20 and 39.

Continue to Qihoo Index tutorial >>>

Here are our tutorials on China keyword research tools:

Keyword research on Baidu: Baidu Index

Keyword research on Qihoo: Qihoo Index

Keyword research on Weibo: Weibo Index

Keyword research on WeChat: WeChat Index

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Up until the middle of 2016, Chinese PPC, especially with Baidu, was, on average, delivering better returns than SEO. This was due to several factors:

• First, the search results, especially for popular terms, were dominated by paid ads. In some cases, hardly any organic results would be displayed in the first page;
• Second, there was little visual distinction in Baidu between paid and organic results and most people couldn’t even tell the difference.

Things have changed significantly since the most recent scandal involving fraudulent Baidu medical ads that led to the death of young cancer sufferer. Following public outcry and negative publicity, Chinese government published new rules concerning Baidu advertising that, among other things, recommended limiting paid results to no more than 30% of SERP (search engine results pages).

Also, the new rules require ads to be more easily distinguishable from organic results in order to minimize the confusion between them.

Baidu, as well as other Chinese search engines, have announced their commitment to comply with the new rules (not that they had any choice in the matter anyway). Less advertising space has inevitably led to increased cost of PPC advertising which has made such campaigns more expensive than they could have been in the past.

On the positive side, the quality of ads is supposed to improve which may, at least in theory, increase trustworthiness of paid ads from a user standpoint.

How to choose between PPC vs. SEO for Chinese market

When it comes to SEO, organic results are now guaranteed to feature prominently in Chinese SERPs which makes SEO a more worthwhile investment than it would have been before the new rules were implemented.

On the other hand, you still need to consider different pros and cons of each strategy.

One of the most important consideration is the time frame. Getting results from PPC is almost instant while building SEO traffic takes time. Typically, it would take somewhere between 3 to 6 months to start seeing some benefits from SEO and 9-12 months of consistent efforts to build a stable organic ranking to show up high enough in SERPs. If you can’t wait that long than PPC is probably the best route to choose.

In addition, since the feedback is fast and measurable, PPC is best at testing different keywords to see which ones work better. Tweaking SEO keywords takes much longer feedback loop.

Calculating which strategy would be more profitable also requires knowing LTV (life time value) of a customer. This figure can then be compared to the cost of acquiring that customer with either SEO or PPC. As a general rule, SEO tends to be a better fit for high volume, low LTV cases.

Another disadvantage of SEO for Chinese market compared to PPC that is worth mentioning is its sensitivity to Baidu algorithms changes. When that happens, an optimized site can lose ranking practically overnight which makes SEO an ongoing, hence expensive, effort.

Obviously PPC doesn’t have this weakness since you are paying Baidu for getting visitors bypassing their ranking algorithms.
On the other hand, organic results are generally considered to be more trustworthy and therefore are more likely to be clicked than the ads. Since now Chinese engines are required to implement more visual distinction between paid and organic results, visitors are becoming more aware of which is which and tend to favor organic ones.

Considering the above point, SEO for Chinese market seems to offer the better value in search marketing than PPC as a long term strategy. There is an exception however: if your niche is dominated by established players or authority sites that have been building their reputation for years, it is highly unlikely that you would be able to unseat them. However, if you employ PPC you still may be able to outbid them.
In conclusion, choosing between SEO and PPC requires answering three basic questions:

• Can you afford waiting a few months for the results or time is of the essence?
• How LTV of your customer stacks against the cost of their acquisition with either strategy?
• How competitive is your space and whether you have a realistic chance to achieve high organic ranking vs. existing sites?

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As China’s largest search engine, Baidu handles approximately 3.3 billion queries per day. In comparison, Google is only slightly ahead with 3.5 billion queries per day globally. Unlike Google, vast majority of Baidu searches come from China.

While Google’s top search results often feature links to Wikipedia, the top results of Baidu searches are very likely to show links to Chinese equivalents of Wikipedia – Baidu Baike along with another high authority site, Baidu Zhidao. Both of them also happen to be Baidu properties.

Considering how the search results on Baidu are structured, it becomes important for brands to have content published on those platforms. If relevant, such content has a good chance of getting some exposure in Baidu top search results.

Let’s have a closer look on those platforms and marketing opportunities with Baidu Baike.

What is Baidu Baike

Baidu Baike (百度百科), which literally means “Baidu Encyclopedia” is a Chinese language, collaboratively-built, web-based encyclopedia that is owned and produced by the Chinese search engine Baidu. The test version was released on April 20, 2006 and within three weeks the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles and surpassed the number in Chinese Wikipedia. From January 2018 Baidu Baike has more than 15.1 million articles.

Baidu Baike also contains food recipes, film products, internet programs and video games, as well as their encyclopedic content. However, unlike Chinese Wikipedia, Baidu Baike never gives a strict definition of the difference between an encyclopedia entry and a dictionary entry, which is why there are many explanations about diction and common phrases.

When it comes to locally registered companies, a lot of information is generated by Baidu automatically. There are some data that can be updated manually but the company must first claim the ownership of that page in order to edit it. All updates are subject to approval by platform’s administrators.

All editors need to register an account before editing, and administrators filter all but the simplest edits before they go public. A phone number registered in mainland China is needed to register a new account.

Baidu Baike Marketing Options

There are two main routes for marketing with Baidu Baike. First, the company should claim their page to get editor access to it. This will offer an opportunity to make such page more informative. However, the editor must first register with the real name and local phone number and provide company’s authorization to the platform.

The second method of Baidu Baike marketing involves using Baidu display advertising to increase chances that the company ad would be shown with the relevant search entry. This route requires a company to register Baidu advertiser’s account.

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Here is our guide Baidu Baike.

Baidu Baike (百度 百科 in Chinese, translated as “Baidu Encyclopedia”) is a collaborative, web-based encyclopedia that is owned and produced by the Chinese search engine Baidu. The test version was released on April 20, 2006 and within three weeks the encyclopedia had grown to more than 90,000 articles and surpassing Chinese Wikipedia. In January 2018 Baidu Baike had more than 15.1 million articles.

Baidu officially declares that Baidu Baike serves as an online encyclopedia, as well as information storage for netizens. Baidu Baike claims “equality”, “cooperation”, “sharing” and “freedom” as the platform’s core values. It is connected with search engines in order to meet information needs of the users.

Baidu Baike Concept

At World Wide Web Consortium 2018, Baidu’s William Chang said that “there is actually no reason for China to use Wikipedia … It is very natural for China to make its own products.”

While using Baidu search engine, the link of the corresponding entry in Baidu Baike, if present, is placed as the first result or one of the first results.

Content restrictions

Articles or comments that contain the following types of content are not allowed:

• Pornographic, violent and “uncivilized” content
• Advertisement
• Personal attacks
• Content against morality and ethics
• Malicious, trivial or spam-like content
• Personal facts

Since Baidu falls under the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, it is mandatory to censor the contents of their encyclopedia in accordance with relevant government regulations. All editors must register accounts with their real names before they can create or edit articles. The administrators filter the edits before they become public.

As a result, Baidu Baike has an advantage over its competitors by complying with Chinese censorship laws. Since Chinese version of Wikipedia does not censor its own content, the government can block it while Baidu Baike remains accessible.

Structure: front page

The current front page of Baidu Baike was put into operation in 6 September 2012. At the top of the page displays the official Baidu Baike slogan “Let all humankind learn about the world”, as well as up-to-date information about the number of users and mentions. The selected content is presented at the bottom left of the front page.

The bottom right contains announcements, plans and projects. The information on the front page usually contains current hot topics, often related to featured news. In addition to these popular topics, there are also one-sentence summaries of the news. Baidu Baike also includes other channels such as nature, culture, geography and special topics such as core users, digital museums, etc.

Submissions

The access pages of Baidu Baike include telephone cards, texts and other supporting information. An earlier version allowed users to respond to pages, but this feature was removed after September 2008, coinciding with time when other major Western social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) became inaccessible in China. The main language of Baidu Baike is Chinese, written with the simplified script, messages written in traditional Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese or Japanese are automatically translated.

Calling cards and texts

Baike telephone cards contain two parts: the description of an item and the basic information. The first is similar to the preface of an article, which provides a general introduction to the whole text. The latter uses a table to summarize basic information and statistics. Both are processed separately from the main part of the article. The main text is limited to 40 thousand bits, which corresponds to 20 thousand Chinese characters.

The earlier versions could only contain one image, but now 20 images and 20 albums can be included in an article. The item may also contain a link to a Baidu card, dynamic screenshots and videos. The information cited is below the main text, which does not distinguish footnotes from other details. However, the quoted images do not specify the source.

Supporting information

Most pieces of supporting information are located at the bottom or the right of the page, except for scientific terms, which are pushed upwards. Usually supporting information is automatically generated by the system, with some manual editing. Supporting information on the right side of the page contains personal information, statistics, today in history, honor contribution and current trends. Statistics include the number of page views, the number of editors, the latest updates, information about makers, etc. Editors who contribute complex articles are also mentioned and honored.

A user can see a database, the Baidu dictionary and related items at the bottom of each article. The celebrity articles have added databases with their individual songs, albums and videos. The user recommendations section is used to collect feedback about the article.

Editing Encyclopedia entries

When an editor makes an edit that has been approved, the editor’s account receives a certain number of experience points based on the complexity of the operation (1 for the simplest operations, 5 for a complex operation). When an editor successfully completes the requested job, the editor receives experience points and a predetermined number of welfare points that can be used to make purchases on Baidu. Editors are divided into 15 levels with corresponding ‘Encyclopedia titles’ (百科 头衔) based on their accumulated experience points. In 2012, the names of the titles were changed from modern business-sounding titles to titles that resembled the Chinese imperial exam and the Confucian scholarship.

Content and categories

In contrast with a traditional encyclopedia, the information in Baidu Baike is somewhat broader. Baidu Baike also contains food recipes, film products, internet programs and video games, as well as their encyclopedic content. However, unlike Chinese Wikipedia, Baidu Baike never gives a strict definition of the difference between an encyclopedia entry and a dictionary entry. There are also many statements about diction and common phrases.

In addition to articles, Baidu Baike contains several special pages:

• A Sandbox entry (编辑 实验), giving users the opportunity to practice editing;
• Help, which offers terminologies, basic settings, prescriptions, user titles, etc.
• User page, called “Baidu Authorized ID” which is similar to that of Wikipedia. However, these are considered an encouragement for advanced users – very few editors receive the privilege to create their own page;
• Baidu Baike has an open policy for adding entries and supports categorized search functions. The classification is based on the characteristics of an item, but not on the quality, and there is no limit to categorization. Baidu Baike now has an elementary categorized page and tree. Part of the open layout can be set at levels, but catalogs with similar meanings cannot be merged or redirected.

Source: Wikipedia

Read more on how you can take advantage of marketing on Baidu Baike.

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Moreover, Baidu is also the leading choice for searches on mobile devices, the increasingly important Chinese search engines market. In June 2016, it was reported that Baidu had 667 million monthly active users (MAU) just for that month alone.

Baidu is still the leader of Chinese search engines market

The entire Chinese search engines market has been growing at fairly steady rate since 2010, adding each year somewhere between 50 and 70 million new users. This year, it is estimated to have reached about 600 million regular users, about 3 quarters of which go to Baidu as their service of choice.

In many ways, Baidu has been following, if not copying, Google’s business strategy. It has diversified its business into areas that are identical to Google’s: from navigation and self-driving cars to AI (artificial intelligence) and VR (virtual reality).

Although, it did hit a few bumps on the road, such as recent scandals with its medical ads and illegal promotions of gambling sites, it is hard to imagine Baidu being knocked off its primary position among Chinese search engines any time soon.

The other Chinese search engines that are worth mentioning are Qihoo (aka Search360) and Sogou. Qihoo in particular has been growing relatively fast in recent years and was the only one that was ever in a position to somewhat threaten Baidu’s dominance in Chinese search engines market, although it is no longer the case.

When it comes to advertising, Baidu should always be considered as the first choice, mainly because of its largest reach. On average, Baidu CPC (cost per click) tends to be higher than Google across almost all industries. Most likely, it will continue to increase as Baidu has been experiencing fall in profits and will probably increase prices as time goes by.

Another reason to focus on Baidu is the fact that its technology is the most advanced. This ultimately affects advertisement CTR (click through rate) through higher relevancy with the search terms.

Baidu has also been active in the video market and currently owns one of the largest online video hosting platforms called iQiYi. As videos are quickly becoming one of the most popular types of content consumed online, Baidu is in a good position to take advantage of that market as well.

In addition, Baidu, like Google, is very good at remarketing which is built into its display network with over 600,000 partner websites in China. Managing both search ads and display ads is done within the same Baidu advertising account where user can simply split the budget between the two channels.

One of the biggest hustles associated with Baidu PPC is opening the advertising account. Unless your company has Chinese business registration, applying for Baidu account involves quite a bit of paperwork and a long verification process. Baidu would typically request translated version of your foreign business license and may require additional proof of incorporation. Companies in financial and medical fields would most certainly be scrutinized more carefully and multiple requests for additional licenses are quite common.

Verification of a website (which must be in Chinese) often leads to more requests to change certain sections (most commonly “about us” part). All this is aimed at making sure that the advertiser is not misrepresenting its business nature and is a legitimate company which will not become involved in promoting anything illegal.

This process is in sharp contrast with Google’s where anyone with a Gmail and a credit card can open an account and start running campaigns almost immediately.

The situation is not that much different with the other Chinese search engines such as Qihoo and Sogou. They also require business registration and licenses from foreign applicants and must follow similar verification process. Once approved, running PPC campaign with those engines is quite similar to Baidu. On the positive side, for businesses that are not in very competitive niches, CPC on Qihoo and Sogou can be substantially lower compared to Baidu. Therefore, it is a good idea to try those engines as well in parallel, although not instead of, Baidu.

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If you are familiar with Google AdWords, Baidu PPC conversion types are quite similar. Unlike Google AdWords, the conversions must be first set up within Baidu TongJi, the equivalent of Google Analytics. Then, they can be tracked in both Baidu TuiGuang (Baidu’s “AdWords”) and Baidu TongJi.

First, here is how search engines define a conversion: each instance of visitors completing a desired activity on your website, such as registration or download, is recorded as a conversion.

Here are the examples of conversion targets:

• Obtaining users’ info: registering online, creating an account etc.;
• Contact objectives: requesting consultation, sending a message, calling a phone number, etc.;
• Interactive goals: video playback event, placing item into a shopping cart, sharing content etc.;
• Revenue target: tracking online orders, payments etc.

4 types of Baidu PPC conversion that you can set up for your campaign:

Page conversions

This type of Baidu PPC conversion is triggered whenever a visitor reaches a specific URL. Each such visit will be registered as one conversion. This is the most common type of conversion used by most advertisers.

For example, a “thank you” page can be set as an URL that triggers conversion. So, whenever a visitor buys a product, signs up for a newsletter, downloads a file etc. – the next page they reach will be that “thank you” page. As soon as this event happens, Baidu knows that this is a conversion and update the report.

Setting it up is straightforward: all you need is the destination URL that triggers the conversion and define recording method (visits, page views, URL variable). You can also assign a conversion value and track conversion revenue performance.

In more advanced settings, you can also setup a path – the sequence of pages which you want your visitor to go to first before reaching the final conversion URL, in other words, a type of a sales funnel.

Even conversion

It is a bit more advanced way to set up Baidu PPC conversions than a simple. The event conversion is triggered whenever a visitor performs specified actions, such as registration, purchase, download, play, and so on.

It can be set using a preview method: user chooses the element on the page and set the conversion event page. If the page where the event is located is not unique, you can use variable part of the URL as a wildcard..

Another method is manually adding event conversion using event element ID.

This type of Baidu PPC conversions also allow you to set conversion value and track revenue.

Duration conversion

This conversion is triggered whenever visitors stayed on the site for longer than the specified time or stayed on a specific page for a specific time duration. This type of conversion can help you to understand whether users have actually read content on the page rather than skipped it.

The setup is quite simple: you set the conversion goal as the total time duration of a visits in hours, minutes or seconds.

There is also an option to set monetary value for this type of conversion.

Page visits conversion

This conversion is defined as the total number of pages opened by a visitor in one session.

You can simply define the number of pages that must be exceeded in one session and that would be recorded as the conversion. Baidu recommends to set this number to minimum 3 pages.

This type of conversion can also be tracked as the revenue once it has been assigned value in the setting but it is optional.

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This post is the first one in the upcoming three part series covering basic market research in China.

Baidu Search

Due to a number reasons, the familiar digital marketing tools, which are mainly run by Google in the Western markets, are not available in China. Google search engine market share in China has fallen below 1% this year and all the Google services, such as Google docs, Google maps, Google analytics etc., have also become blocked from access. This fact alone is making life quite difficult not only for marketers but for regular citizens and businesses.

Luckily, there is an alternative and it is Baidu (baidu.com), the largest Chinese search engine with about 60% market share.

In fact, just a few years ago, Baidu was much more dominant reaching about 80% of the total search market. Since then, other popular services became more competitive and managed to grab larger market share away from Baidu. Those platforms are 360 Search (haosou.com) and Sogou (sogou.com) holding somewhere around 30% and 15% respectively as of the end 2014.

Here I will be mainly focusing on Baidu but, in principle, other search engines are fairly similar and can also be used for the purpose of basic market research.

Just like with Google, your basic research can start with a simple search term of a product translated to Chinese. Now, a word of warning, I strongly advise against using Google Translate or other machine translation program for that. You must find a native speaker to verify the term that you are interested in.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you are interested to search for the term “sunglasses”. Here is what Google Translate would return:

Unfortunately, even though the translation may technically be correct, no one in China actually uses the term太阳镜.

The proper term for sunglasses is太阳眼镜 and this is what you should be using for Baidu search. Once again, Google Translate cannot be relied upon even for a translation of simple keywords, let alone complex “long tail” ones.

Anatomy of a typical Baidu search results

Here is an example of a Baidu search results for the term “sunglasses” (太阳眼镜). Paid results are typically grouped at the top and on the right panels like in the example below:

Compared to a typical Google search results page, with Baidu, it is somewhat harder to tell the difference between paid and organic results. In fact, the only thing that indicates paid ads would be a small word “推广” at the bottom right.

For popular keywords, there would be very few organic results (if any at all) on the first results page.

Next, you would typically see results from Baidu-owned sites like Baike (equivalent to Wikipedia) or Baidu Zhidao (Chinese “Yahoo answers”).

News related results would be ranked next followed by the results from ecommerce sites. Interestingly, links to the largest ecommerce platforms of Alibaba, Taobao and Tmall, would not be shown at all. This is the result of the fierce competition between Baidu and Alibaba.

Finally, closer to the end of the page in this example, you can finally see a few organic results followed by another block of ads:

What can you learn from Baidu search? First, you can immediately see the level of competition in your intended market. If there are many paid ads, be prepared to compete with those advertisers for the same keywords.

Next, you will be able to learn who the main competitors would be and what they are offering. It’s a good idea to go and see their sites, explore the offers, sales strategies and distribution channels.

Finally, basic search would give you a better sense on whether it would be wise to invest in Baidu pay-per-click (PPC) or SEO to get ranked organically. I’m going to discuss those choices in more details in the future posts.

Stay tuned for the upcoming post on how to perform basic market research with Chinese online marketplaces.

The post Competitive Research in China, Part I: Baidu Search first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Competitive Research in China, Part I: Baidu Search appeared first on Sampi.co.

Here are just some of the most impressive nuggets on what has happened on one minute on China Internet:

• Almost 400,000 people log in to WeChat app every minute;
• 625,000 Youku-Tudou videos are being watched;
• Almost 65,000 Weibo tweets with over 50,000 of them containing images;
• Over 4 million of Baidu search queries;
• $1.1 million is spent on Taobao or Tmall;

China Internet in 60 seconds:

(credit to TechInAsia)

The post Infographic: China Internet in One Minute first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Infographic: China Internet in One Minute appeared first on Sampi.co.