Being a worldwide industry problem, China’s digital advertising market seems to be one of the worst affected ones. Chinese  internet is the second most popular advertising media after television and was estimated at $55.48 billion by the end of 2018 according to China Daily. Unfortunately, advertisers’ losses could account for up to third of that amount, mostly lost to non-human traffic and fraudulent CTR (click through rate).

The report by Miaozhen Systems, released about a year ago, claims that auto and telecommunications were hit the worst with up to a third of the traffic being non-human, i.e. generated by bots and crawlers, while food & drink and the fast moving consumer products industry saw the lowest rate at 8.52% and 11.88% respectively.

…many local computers still run on Windows XP that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Bots can infect such machines much easier and, in fact, a proportionally larger share of fraudulent traffic seems to be coming from lower tier cities where more people still use older Windows OS.

How do the losses occur exactly? A small piece of malicious software, a “bot”, is placed on a host computer from which it visits various sites in the background without user noticing anything abnormal with their machine. It’s even harder to spot for advertisers because it shares the real user’s unique “cookie” identifier.

Other pieces of software can stack hundreds of ads on top of each other on a website, or place the entire website into a small pixel on a page. This way, it would seem that a particular ad was displayed while, in fact, it was never seen by a visitor.

CPC (cost per click) ads are also affected as such bots can be smart enough to mix real clicks with the “fake” ones, making it harder to identify as a non-human activity.

There are number of reasons why China is one of the worst affected markets. First, many local computers still run on Windows XP that is no longer supported by Microsoft. Bots can infect such machines much easier and, in fact, a proportionally larger share of fraudulent traffic seems to be coming from lower tier cities where more people still use older Windows OS.

Second, not all the fake traffic is caused by bots, some is accounted for search engine crawlers. Since search engine market in China is much more fragmented than in the West, there are simply more crawlers visiting each site.

A third reason that is also specific to China is the fact that many people would willingly install special traffic software on their systems in order to attract more followers to their social media profiles, making their social activity appear more popular. However, such programs would do many other things without user’s knowledge or consent, effectively plugging such computer into a larger bot network.

Lastly, there is a lack of habit and willingness to go after the offenders and many in the industry still consider this problem to be the necessary evil that nothing much can be done about. Although, there is a technology in place to combat the problem, its adoption in China has been slow.

A new alarming trend is the increasing proliferation of online fraud in the growing mobile space. Android is by far the most popular mobile OS in China but the official Google Play store is not the usual place to go for apps. Most people would go to many smaller apps market which exercise very little control over quality.

While, at the moment, most non-human traffic in China is still PC based, it is reasonable to assume that with more people using Android devices to access internet, the worst of mobile advertising fraud is yet to come.

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The number of surveys indicate that Chinese are increasingly looking toward foreign brands at the expense of Chinese brands for everything from food and cosmetics to airlines and hotels. This means more opportunities for foreign companies considering increasing their foothold in Chinese market and winning more customers at the expense of the local competition.

According to the surveys, China’s food and entertainment industries are at the bottom of the “brand trust scale” while local technology firms are perceived as the most trustworthy brands. In retail, Western companies Nike and Zara enjoy the best reputation, however in grocery market, consumers show more price sensitivity. For instance, Taiwanese grocery chain RT Mart is doing well on the brand trust and overall value while British Tesco is leading among Western grocers in China.

Remarkably, large number of Chinese brands in retail are still perceived as not delivering enough value, even at throwaway prices. As a result, consumers are willing to pay premium for Western branded products as long as the price difference is reasonable.

Companies should learn to engage with their customer from the senior level. A company’s president or a CEO should be able to come out and address important issues head on.

Apart from the food safety scandals, social media has been playing increasing role in shaping brand perception of local products and companies. Chinese netizens are typically more likely to leave negative comments in social media following disappointing experience as opposed to writing raving reviews if the experience was positive. This situation often leads to brands falling out favor very quickly, especially if a company fails to address its social media crisis fast enough.

In one of the episodes of Thoughtful China program, Chinese consumers’ trust was the topic of discussion between several participants across number of industries. The interviewer was asking questions about the best ways of building brand trust, manage brand reputation and respond to crises. Below is the summary of the answers that made the most sense to me:

Companies should learn to engage with their customer from the senior level. A company’s president or a CEO should be able to come out and address important issues head on. Communication by senior level management would build trust and put such company on a different level of engagement with its customers.

China is still largely a relationship based society which explains the phenomenon of KOL (key opinion leaders) in the social media – individuals whose opinions are held in high regard by the large number, sometimes hundreds of thousand, of followers. Building relationship with KOL in the area of company’s operation is extremely important for brand reputation management.

Company should consider cultivating internal KOLs, the process that takes time and requires close engagement in social media. Once again, company’s CEO with enough charisma could be the best candidate for KOL. Chinese customers are very likely to appreciate such company’s efforts to build direct relationship with consumers from the highest level.

Chinese consumers tend to put more trust in large companies that are viewed as more reliable. In the West, on the other hand, people are more likely to distrust big corporations. Communicating the size, global reach and long history of a particular company will actually be beneficial in China in terms of brand perception.

Consumers in China are becoming increasingly demanding for greater social responsibility from companies they deal with. Issuing periodic social responsibility reports by such companies, as it is common in the West, will also help in building better reputation and, ultimately, solid and sustainable brand trust.

Overall, local brand trust situation in China shows signs of improvement, partly due to increased pressure from the government on corporations to become more transparent. Also, China’s market is still young and, since building trust takes time, foreign brands with established history and track record are likely to still stay ahead of local competitors for some time in the area of brand trust .

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Building a Chinese website for a foreign brand maybe not be as straight forward task as in the case of other markets. Thanks to a unique nature of Chinese internet and various market specifics, brands must modify their approach for establishing China web presence.

Here is the comprehensive list of 15 points to consider for building Chinese websites for brands.

#1 Use native translation for Chinese website

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. It should go without saying that companies should always use professional translators to repurpose the original content for a Chinese website version while also making sure that they are proofread by native Mandarin speakers.

#2 Remove links to blocked social media

While re-purposing landing pages for Chinese market, many companies forget to remove standard links to their social media accounts that are inaccessible in China anyway. The links to company Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram links won’t work anyway and but those broken links may also significantly slow down Chinese website loading time. Ideally, a page loading time should not exceed 5 seconds, although that is often hard to achieve with overseas hosting (more on it below).

#3 Optimize your Chinese website loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. Unfortunately, without local business registration, hosting in China will not be possible. The next best option would be to get a hosting in Hong Kong. Some Hong Kong based hosting providers would often advertise “fast China route” options without physically having to host on the Mainland’s servers.

Alibaba Cloud is a popular hosting solution that is cheap and easy to sign up for. However, make sure that you select Hong Kong based servers when buying their hosting package.

#4 Embed videos from local platforms

Embedded videos which are hosted on YouTube or Vimeo won’t be displayed in China (see #2). The solution is to setup an account on YouKu, Chinese YouTube equivalent, upload your video there and link to it from your Chinese landing page. However, one should keep in mind that free YouKu accounts will often display pre-roll ads to Mainland visitors. The solution is to opt to paid YouKu accounts or find an alternative video hosting platform that isn’t blocked in China.

#5 Integrate share buttons and links to Chinese social media

If you already have Chinese social media presence on Weibo, YouKu, WeChat or other platforms, make sure to include links to those sites on your Chinese website. As there is no such thing as a “WeChat link”, your Chinese website should display official account’s QR code. This will not only demonstrate to your visitors that you have an established local presence but will also help in getting more followers to your Chinese social media channels.

If your website includes sharable content, make sure to include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat that do not require having an account on those platforms.

#6 Localize the contact form

Most website nowadays offer some type of subscription form to collect visitor’s email and other data. What is often missed is localizing such the forms by making sure that all the fields are properly translated to Chinese and don’t have any original English field names which can confuse visitors.

Also, keep in mind that while your English form may have separate fields for first and last names, Chinese equivalent would typically use just one name field for both the surname (one character) and the given name (one or two characters).

#7 Optimize for mobile

Mobile optimization of a website is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic comes from mobile devices anyway. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese website ensuring that it displays correctly on most types of mobile screens.

You may consider a separate design for a mobile version of the site to pack the most essential info “above the fold” and minimize scrolling and clicking text links.

#8 Live support

Having been spoiled by Taobao, China’s online consumers often expect instant live support for Chinese website. This is especially true for ecommerce or website that offer services.

One of the most critical components for a successful conversion of online consumers is being able to communicate with them in real, or almost real time. Luckily, there are many options available for such live chats that can keep track of the conversations and capture users’ data at the same time. Companies like Alibaba offer their own chat solutions that can incorporates into other sites.

#9 ICP License for Chinese website

If your company is registered in China, it is eligible to apply for ICP (internet content provider) license. It would allow you to get hosting in China that helps improving Chinese website loading time as well signal to your users that are in full compliance with the local law.

The ICP license number should be displayed in the footer like this:

#10 Subdomains or multiple domains

Chinese search engines generally dislike subdomains – something that is very common with multilingual websites. For example, you should avoid setting up en.mysite.com for English and zh. mysite.com for Chinese. Baidu prefers to have different languages on completely separate domains. For example, if www.mysite.com is your main site, www.mysite.cn could be its Chinese language equivalent. This makes it harder to maintain, however, if you want to rank high on Baidu – do not use subdomains.

#11 Using robot.txt file

Another Baidu quirk is disfavoring robot.txt file – Google’s standard way to communicate with search engine crawlers. This is the most common way to tell search engines which pages should not be crawled. For the purpose of your China web presence, those specific instructions should be set in .htaccess file or in server settings. This is another reason to use separate domain for your Chinese site (see #1).

#12 Domain names

Baidu ranks .CN domains higher than the equivalent .COM and.NET. As .CN domain registration is open to foreigners now, there is no excuse not to grab it. Also, once you have established you China web presence and your brand becomes well-known, chances are that .CN domain may become the target of internet squatters. So, if it is still available, register it now.

#13 Blacklisted keywords

If your site uses any of the blacklisted keywords, it will be deindexed by Baidu and probably blocked from access too. Wikipedia keeps updated list of blacklisted keywords that are mostly related to politics but keep in mind that the list may change quickly triggered by specific current events. In any case, staying away from politics in China is probably a good idea anyway.

#14 Using iFrames, JavaScript and Flash

Similar to Google, Baidu can’t crawl iFrames and Flash content. Although Google is getting much better in crawling JavaScript, Baidu is still pretty much blind to it. This means that any of your SEO content should not be in JavaScript which also includes navigation drop down menu. This is why it is a good idea to have a duplicate footer menu that is not JS based. As for iFrames and Flash – they belong to history anyway.

#15 Keep it Baidu-friendly

Due to frequent connectivity problems, Baidu’s crawlers won’t index pages that are too deep in your hierarchy. Keep your website’s architecture flat and accessible.

Anchor text should of course be in Chinese. They should also match the keywords being used on your website. Baidu is quite strict about this and may penalize sites where the anchor text and keywords are not in sync.

Don’t count on Baidu finding your site quickly – it’s better to submit it manually. Since, Baidu doesn’t have an equivalent to Google webmaster tools, the website has to be re-submitted every time there is a major change. Here is the link to Baidu submission tool.

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In this post, we are going to review the primary routes for promotion and advertising on Sina Weibo. There are three basic ways to promote a brand on Weibo:

• Weibo Fans headlines (粉丝头条)
• Weibo Fans pass (粉丝通)
• Weibo Micro task (微任务)

Weibo Fans Headlines

This is the simplest way to promote a post by pushing it to the top of followers’ feed. At present, Weibo charges 2.37 RMB per post to be displayed above others in the feed for 24 hours. There is 40% discount for any posts that mention anything related to Weibo itself.

Making a post more prominently displayed can be an effective way to attract clicks from brand followers by having them notice the content as soon as they log in. The obvious disadvantage is the fact that it only improves your content’s visibility with your existing followers and does little to acquire new ones. On the other hand, the price for this type of promotion is fairly affordable.

Fans Pass

This type of promotion involves an ad campaign and can be initiated and managed with an ad account. The ad account opening process requires local ID and usually takes about 3 days to complete the approval process.

There are two pricing models: CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPE (cost per engagement) which are determined by automated bidding process, similar to the familiar Google Adwords.

CPM prices start at 5 RMB per CPM and can be increased by bidding up with 0.1 RMB increments.

“E” in CPE type of Weibo advertising stands for “engagement” that can be either click, a forward, a like or a follow. The initial price is set to minimum 0.5 RMB per CPE and can be increased at 0.01 RMB increment. The final price will be ultimately determined by quality of the content and competitive offers. If the price is set too low and the content is not engaging enough, the ad may not receive enough exposure, so setting the right bid and making adjustment to the content takes a bit of tweaking.

Weibo ad account provides some analytics tool to judge the effectiveness of an ad campaign but finding the right combination of all the parameters takes some skills and experience.

Micro task

The third type of promotion, which is also unique to Weibo, is called Micro Task and involves engaging KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders.

KOLs are basically people with a lot of followers and are considered to be authority figures in their areas of expertise. Some KOLs have millions of followers which enables them to broadcast a targeted message to a very large audiences.

Depending on a specific industry, Weibo offers a range of KOLs to choose from. Typically, those with the largest following are more expensive to engage.

Working with KOLs requires opening an account and paying a deposit that is currently set to 2,000 RMB for companies. Once a suitable KOL is chosen, you can set a task (hence the name of this feature – “micro-task”) that normally involves posting your content in KOLs account that should appear at the time of your choosing and remain visible for a set period.

Depending on a specific KOL and the type of promotion task he/she receives, the price is set by Weibo automatically.

Individuals (as opposed to companies) can also use micro-task to promote posts. There is no deposit for individual account and you pay as you go per each task. On the other hand, individuals can’t pick KOLs that will be assigned by Weibo automatically.

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The biggest problem with email marketing in general and China email marketing in particular is, of course, spam. Most countries around the world have introduced laws and regulations designed to limit amount of spam by specifying requirements to emails and imposing various degrees of penalties for violators. For example, federal anti-spam legislation CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 requires proper opt-out link to be included in a promotional mail, valid “from” email and a clear “subject” line.

The Chinese equivalent anti-spam legislation is called “Regulations On Internet Email Services” and is, by far, more complex and severe compared to its US equivalent. This law applies to emails sent to all Chinese residents and, at least in theory, covers users who happened to receive emails while in Chinese territory.

Your China email marketing checklist

Here is the brief summary of the requirements to a promotional email according to the law:

Verifiable Permission.

Chinese law requires recipient’s explicit permission to be given in order to include an email to a mass mailing list. Unsubscribe or opt-out option is not enough. The permission has to be verifiable and stored indefinitely in case of an audit;

Word “Ad” in subject line.

Either English “Ad” for English language emails or the equivalent Chinese word for “advertisement” is required in the subject line;

Content requirements.

Chinese promotional email definition is much broader than the one of CAN-SPAM Act and includes all kinds of messages containing any type of advertisement;

Downloadable content requirements.

If a message contains any links to external content, such as a piece of software or an app, the law requires a written guarantee that they do not contain any spyware or anything that can facilitate hackers. It is not clear whether this applies to downloadable graphics such as images or thumbnail icons;

Content restrictions.

Article 57 of the Regulations on Telecommunications stipulates the content of the allowable email which is purposefully left quite vague. There are thousands of words and topics that are currently banned and the list is very dynamic.  Politically sensitive topics are the obvious examples as well as everything that is deemed obscene or pornographic. It’s a good idea to refer to the list of blacklisted keywords before starting your China email marketing campaign.

According to the law, the penalty goes from 10,000 yuan  and up to 30,000 yuan per email in case the violation involves “unlawful proceeds”. The law doesn’t specify what such “unlawful proceeds” might mean.

So, considering such tight restrictions and severe penalties, why would anyone even entertain the idea of mass email marketing campaign in China? Well, here is the upside: so far, there have been no known or, at least, reasonably high profile cases of the actual application of the law or prosecuting any offenders. In fact, the law does little to help with the major spam problem that exists today in Chinese internet space.

Obviously, one has to be aware of the legal aspect of email marketing in China and continue following common practices such as including unsubscribe links, acquiring and growing email mailing lists by legitimate means and, of course, staying away from sensitive topics. Violating such rules can have your domain blacklisted risking completely blocking your company’s access to users in China. One should keep in mind that the famous China’s Great Firewall is notoriously effective and you don’t want to find yourself on the other side of it one day.

Talk to us about your next China email marketing campaign.

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On the other hand, many foreign brands, who want to jump in on WeChat, don’t realize that the platform comes with the number of limitations. While in some cases and if done right, WeChat marketing can be incredibly effective, in other cases the results can be quite disappointing.

5 Common Misconceptions about WeChat Marketing

#1 Followers will find you

Unlike other popular social networks, WeChat’s private nature makes discovery quite difficult. WeChat’s own search function only allows looking for an account containing the exact match to a specific word. Even with that, the search results are often inaccurate. There are only a few ways you can acquire a follower:

• Have them scan your QR code placed on other media (website, banner ad, print, billboard etc.);
• Have someone forward a link to your account on WeChat to their friends (essentially word of mouth);
• Having someone to post a nice comment about you in their feed (moments) with the link to your account (KOL);
• In-app advertising – more about it below;

Here is more about getting WeChat followers organically.

#2 No one else can use my brand

Many popular brands who are just getting around starting their WeChat marketing campaigns in China often find out that someone else is already using their brand name and logo. Once an account has been created by someone it can be quite hard to have WeChat remove it. However, ignoring the problem is not a good idea either.

If, following the complaint, the owner of “squatter” account is refusing to comply by changing their WeChat account’s name and logo, it is possible to file a complaint to Tencent by filing proper paperwork. To be successful, the legitimate brand owner has to prove their ownership of the trademark in China which is the whole new topic. More on registering trademarks in China can be found in one of my favorite resources online at China Law Blog.

#3 In-app mobile advertising within WeChat is effective

In fact, advertising within WeChat is notoriously ineffective while also extremely expensive. Click through rate (CTR) of such ads is usually quite low for a number of reasons. The main problem is that once clicked, the user than will be taken out of the app elsewhere, usually to a built-in WeChat browser. Since most people don’t casually browse WeChat but have some purpose while using it, they wouldn’t typically abandon their activity in the middle to be redirected elsewhere.

The ads within user’s Moments (WeChat’s version of feed), are also rarely relevant and are not displayed consistently. Here is my other post about the issues with WeChat advertising.

#4 Recycling of posts from my other social media channels will do just fine on WeChat

Although, it could be an effective strategy to reuse content from other social media channels or blogs for WeChat, the posts are often not optimized for this platform. For example, articles that are too long or those relying too much on the graphics may not render well on WeChat’s smartphone screen.

One of the keys for WeChat marketing is figuring out the posts format that is just right in both size and layout. The graphics should be clear enough while displayed as a thumbnail in multiple picture posts while not looking pixelized when extended to the full screen. That would require some tweaking and testing to get everything right.

Also, if there are external links, they should lead to properly responsive pages that are optimized for mobile.

#5 WeChat marketing allows accurate targeting

We wish that one was true. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to segment WeChat marketing messages, which is also true for its advertising. On the most basic level, the followers can be segmented only by their location and gender. Even the location is based on whatever WeChat subscriber has set and not on the actual geolocation. Whenever a more granular approach is needed,  each individual follower can be tagged and grouped. This would allow sending more targeted messages to a specific audience.

Such segmentation can be either manual – often an extremely time and labor consuming effort, or automated with some 3rd party backend platform customization. The biggest disadvantage of the platform, as compared to other popular social media channels, is its lack of tools to target followers based on their behavior, a crucial component in many effective digital marketing strategies.

In conclusion, while WeChat can be a powerful marketing tool in China, it’s important to realize what it can and cannot do. The best use of WeChat would be to deploy it as a one of the marketing elements, closely integrated with other channels, not in isolation.

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Recent statistics show that there were about 430 million online video users in China and this number has been steadily growing at the annual rate of between 12 to 15% since 2007:

Given such enormous reach and, traditionally, high degree of video consumers’ engagement, advertising on this platform could be highly effective. In fact, according to Youku’s recent financial report, nearly 90% of its revenue comes from selling ads.

On the other hands, advertising on Youku is significantly different from YouTube in several key aspects. In this post, I’m going to review different advertising options with Youku.

More about brand advertising, less about direct marketing

Although some targeted advertising is available with Youku, the options are quite limited. As opposed to Youtube, the platform seems to be unable to target specific users based on their preferences or browsing history. Instead, Youku is still focused on blanket advertising by pursuing the largest possible audience, similar to traditional media such as TV or newspapers.

There is an inherent disadvantage of such approach: displaying Porsche ad to a student or a soccer mom would be a complete waste of Porsche’s advertising dollars (not that we’d feel too sorry for them anyway…). It’s reasonable to assume that Youku is working on smarter ways to display ads but, unfortunately to marketers, it isn’t there just yet.

Youku does offer a lucrative opportunity to reach extremely large audience but it doesn’t come cheap. Also, lack of focus on direct marketing makes Youku platform less suitable for companies seeking to focus on a specific audience.

Limited value of the analytics

Just as with Youtube, Youku makes basic analytics available to its customers. The data includes viewers’ demographics, geolocation, browsing technology, language, operating systems etc. As mentioned above, since the targeting options are not yet well developed, the practical value of such statistics has its limitations. It seems that Youku does know how to display ads relevant to what a viewer is presently watching but can’t show them based on recent browsing history – something that Youtube or Google’s Adsense does quite well.

Great multitude of ad options

The ads can be displayed in various shapes and forms: from videos to banners which can be both static or animated, as well as text links and buttons. Those are often referred to as “hard advertising”. Other forms include product placements in in-house produced content, or branded viral videos all of which are collectively known as “soft advertising”.

The price depends on the type of an ad, where and how it is displayed, and what scheme is chosen by a client. The most expensive ads are the ones that are displayed near the top of the page and those that are larger in size as opposed to smaller ones or those that are visible only after scrolling.

For big spenders only

Advertising prices didn’t see significant changes since 2012 and they vary wildly depending on the type of ads.

There are three basic schemes:

• CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
• banners in various locations on the site
• ads displayed with the video being watched which could be pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll as well as pause ads.

Here is an example of the list prices (in RMB) for pre-roll CPM ads which are based on the IP address location and the length:

These are the list prices for for banner ads (Youku does offer volume discounts):

The actual price list of Youku ads choices is obviously much more elaborate and contains a few dozen different models, however, clearly, there are no low budget options here.

Who are the typical advertisers?

According to Youku, the vast majority of the advertisers are producers of the fast-moving consumer goods (~50%); IT services and telecoms (~20%); internet services (~10%) with the rest of the 20% spread between automotive companies, financial services and some others. Youku works with fairly large number of globally-recognized companies such as P&G, Coca-cola, General Motors, Apple as well as local heavyweights like China Mobile, e-commerce company Jingdong.com, food company Yum! etc.

In conclusion, Youku does offer a lucrative opportunity to reach extremely large audience but it doesn’t come cheap. Also, lack of focus on direct marketing makes Youku platform less suitable for companies seeking to focus on a specific audience. On the other hand, advertisers that could benefit less from accurate targeting, fast food chains for example, can see their advertising dollars well spent by using Youku platform.

In the next post, I’ll get into some more details on various advertising and ad display options with Youku. Stay tuned.

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The main attributes of various types of ads running on Youku site is the ad’s location, size, frequency and media type. Prices are based on the combination of those attributes and range between  30 RMB per thousand impressions for a 15 seconds pre-roll ad with CPM model  to 250,000 RMB for 24 hours of displaying the largest banner ad on the top of the page.

Here are the most common types of advertising on Youku:

Youku top banner ads

Banner ads can be displayed at the top, the middle or at the bottom of a page, as well as on the right panel’s top or bottom. Here is an example of the top page and top side panel’s banner ads:

Youku mid-page banner ads

Getting to the middle page banner takes a bit of scrolling down and it looks like this:

Youku bottom banner ads

Finally, the cheapest (relatively speaking) are the bottom banners that wouldn’t be visible until a user scrolls all the way down:

Youku pre-roll ads

Those are the ads that are displayed before the start of a video and they can’t be skipped:

Youku mid and post-roll ads

Finally, mid and post-roll ads are displayed during the video at certain times or at the end of it, similar to TV commercials. Since they can be skipped by a viewer they will be priced at much lower rate than pre-roll ones.

Here is an example of a post-roll ad that is displayed upon the end of a clip and will stay on until closed:

Youku pause ads

Pause ads is anther popular choice of adverting on Youku. Those ads are displayed whenever a video is paused. Such ad would stay on until playback is resumed. Those types of ads are usually static but can be quite effective – if the video is paused several times, a viewer will be seeing it every time which increases the impression rate per the same user.

Here is how a pause ad would look like:

Moreover, there is a nice feature of Youku that keeps a small floating frame of the video in constant view every time the page is scrolled down. This means that whenever a clip is paused, a pause ad will stay in view no matter where a user is on the page. Here is how that would look like:

In conclusion, advertising options on Youku although similar to Youtube, are in some ways more versatile and creative. This, however, does make pages look more cluttered and disorganized. On the other hand, Chinese consumers generally don’t consider such apparent clutter a distraction and, in fact, do prefer busy look of sites like Youku to clean and minimalist style that is more effective with Western consumers. Read here more on this particular topic.

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There are several reasons for this trend:

1. First is the natural growth of businesses is driving the demand for office supplies. More offices, big or small, are being opened, existing offices expanded or moved to larger facilities;
2. Then there is a drive to save cost. Buying online allows making purchases fast and efficient. Products and brands can be easily researched and prices compared finding the best value;
3. Finally, proliferation of Chinese ecommerce and general public’s familiarity with it, is making the transition and acceptance of online procurement a more natural process;

Chinese B2B Ecommerce figures

As noted by China Internet Watch, enterprise online purchases have been growing particularly fast since 2010 when the government first introduced new policies to support ecommerce and e-businesses. As the trend continues, it is predicted that Chinese B2B ecommerce market will increase at the annual growth rate of 30% for the next 3 years.

Another interesting fact is that, as of H1 2015,  Jingdong (JD.com) holds the largest market share (39.4%) in this particular segment of Chinese ecommerce. It is followed by Alibaba with 18.1% and Suning at 10.9%. The rest is shared between Amazon China, Gome, Yihaodian, Dangdang and others.

This also shows that Jingdong has definitely been on the rise in 2015, taking even larger share of ecommerce away from Alibaba. They are focusing on their traditional strong areas such as appliances and electronics which, incidentally, are the products that businesses tend to purchase.

According to H1 2015 statistics, computers accounted for almost 40% of all online purchases in Chinese B2B ecommerce segment, followed by basic office supplies at 22.7%, mobile communication devices (16.5%) and other digital products such as electronic appliances and networking equipment (7.7% and 3.4% respectively).

This means that if your company is selling products in any of the above categories, Jingdong could be one of the sales channels to consider setting up. Targeting businesses through advertising within Jingdong is another element that should be incorporated with the overall B2B marketing strategy. Such ads should be tailored specifically to speak to the needs of office based businesses, stressing the overall utility, better service and cost savings.

The post Chinese B2B Ecommerce: Selling to Businesses Online first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Chinese B2B Ecommerce: Selling to Businesses Online appeared first on Sampi.co.

When it comes to Chinese market, it is often a good idea to have your site translated to both Simplified Chinese for Mainland China audience and to Traditional Chinese used in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Even though, both Taiwanese and Hongkongese would have little problem reading content in Simplified Chinese, having those two choices would be seen as showing respect to millions of Traditional Chinese readers. Large number of corporate executives and managers of companies in China are from Taiwan and Hong Kong and it would certainly be a good idea to offer them proper translation as well.

Website translation to Chinese doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg

If you are on a bootstrap budget, the first thing to try would be finding a freelance translator through sites like Elance.com or Odesk.com (recently merged to Upwork.com). It’s by far the cheapest option but could also be a hit and miss.

Many freelance translators, who are native Chinese speakers, don’t have a good grasp of Traditional Chinese and would simply use machine translation program, like Google Translate, that simply substitutes Simplified to Traditional characters. As a result, Traditional Chinese translation would look awkward and, sometimes, completely unreadable. If you use any of the freelance translators, make sure to test them first by asking them to translate a paragraph to both languages and have it verified with a native Taiwanese or Hongkongese.

A word of caution: for website translation to Chinese, never hire translators who are not native speakers, this would be a complete waste of your money. You should also make sure to verify the work before you release the payment.

If your company has a decent budget for a website translation to Chinese, then, by all means, consider a professional translation firm or a local marketing localization agency. They would typically pay attention to details that are beyond a straight translation, such as proper formatting of time, date and currency.

You still have to exercise caution while hiring a professional translation company – unfortunately, many of them are simply one-two man operation, regardless of what they say about themselves on their website. Large number of them would use machine translation software with some corrections afterwards. Be prepared to shop around for a while as, in my experience, 80% of such firms provide very low quality work.

Just like with the freelancers, you should test the quality first by asking them to translate one paragraph and, if you suspect that machine translation has been used for any of the languages (most likely Traditional Chinese), don’t hire them.

If you are prepared to spend anywhere around $1,000 or more, make sure to have a written contract with such company. The contract should stipulate that the company must correct the translation within 2-4 weeks after submitting it to you if you find any issues. There must be a legal recourse clause in the contract in case of substandard quality of the translation but it’s always time limited, so make sure to check their work carefully as soon as you receive it.

Now to the technical side. Most websites use CMS (content management system) that make inserting new language a much easier process than editing HTML or XML files. You have to make sure that your system supports Chinese which shouldn’t be a problem with all modern CMS.
A website can also be configured to load a specific language based on IP address location. However, there should be an option to change an automatically selected language because not everyone who may visit your site should be assumed to be able to read Chinese. Besides, IP address based geolocation would not work if a site visitor uses VPN – a very common way to bypass China’s infamous Great Firewall in order to get access to blocked sites.

The post Localizing web presence for China: Website Translation to Chinese first appeared on Sampi.co.

The post Localizing web presence for China: Website Translation to Chinese appeared first on Sampi.co.