If you are on a bootstrap budget, the first thing to try would be finding a freelance translator through sites like Upwork or Freelancer. It’s by far the cheapest option but could also be a hit and miss. Typically, we always suggest 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 Hongkongneese  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.

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 Baidu or Google Translate, that simply substitute Simplified to Traditional characters. As a result, Traditional Chinese translation would often 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 Hongkongnese.

Never hire translators who are not native Chinese speakers, this would be a complete waste of your money. You should also make sure to verify the work before you release the payment.

Localization is not the same as translation of the content, although translation is the major part of it.

Another option is to hire a professional translation company but, unfortunately, many of them are simply a 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 our 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.

In the coming post, we will discuss other aspects of web presence localization specific to China market.

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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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Should marketers adopt cross-cultural approach in marketing communication or attempt to take into account psychological and socio-cultural associations and meanings that different colors convey in various cultures?

Most of the research on color theory has been done in the West and was primarily focused on Western color perceptions. It comes to no surprise that those perceptions differ significantly in the East. Since the color is an integral element of corporate and marketing communications it is important to understand those differences and make necessary adjustments in order to induce desired moods and emotions, which in turn, will help influencing consumers’ perceptions and behavior.

In this post we’ve pulled together information from several sources: article by MUBEEN M. ASLAM in Australian Journal of Marketing Communications (Vol. 12, No. 1, 15–30, March 2006); A Look into Color Theory in Web Design by Sixrevisions.com and Color Branding: The Meanings Behind Colors by Everyjoe.com.

Let’s start looking at each of the main colors:

Red

Western perception: Masculine, Love, Lust, Fear, Anger

Chinese perception: Love, Happiness, Luck

Summary: while powerful and strong, red also carries some negative connotations in Western culture. For Chinese, however, red is almost universally associated with the positive and good taste;

Yellow

Western perception: Happiness, Energy, Jealousy

Chinese perception: Pure, Good taste, Royal, Authority

Summary: yellow is perhaps the second most culturally important color after red for the Chinese. Historically, red & gold (yellow) were the colors associated with royalty;

Green

Western perception: Growth, Harmony, Good taste, Lack of experience

Chinese perception: Pure, Reliable, Happy

Summary: green has been extensively used in web design and remains popular across all the cultures, one of the “safest” colors in marketing design;

Blue

Western perception: High quality, Trust, Dependability, Coldness

Chinese perception: High quality, Trustworthiness

Summary: universally perceived as a “color of trust”, blue remains the most popular design choice for corporate sites across the continents, excellent fit for health products;

Purple

Western perception: Authority, Power, Sophistication, Luxury, Feminine (lighter), Sadness (darker)

Chinese perception: Expensive, Luxury, Love

Summary: there are definite similarities in the perception of purple across most of the cultures and it remains a popular choice for designs reflecting sophistication and high value;

Black

Western perception: Expensive, Elegance, Sophistication, Fear, Grief

Chinese perception: Expensive, Powerful

Summary: for the Chinese, black doesn’t carry the same negative association common in Western cultures (death, unknown) which may complicate its usage to fit both markets.

White

Western perception: Purity, Happiness, Innocence, Cold, Distant

Chinese perception: Death, Mourning

Summary: perception of white couldn’t be more different between Western and Eastern cultures. While gaining popularity in modern design in the West, it should be used with caution for the Chinese audience;

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First, let start with the definition of – a landing page (or LP) is where your potential customer “lands” first after clicking your link in the search results, social media or an email. Making sure that landing page design is clear, focused and the content is easy to understand is the key in converting visitors to customers.

Before we look at the specific guidelines that are relevant to building a Chinese landing page, let’s make sure that the general page structure follows best practices applicable to all types of landing pages.

Let’s start off with a quick rundown of those guidelines that are applicable to all types of landing pages:

• Having clear and concise headline up top
• Strategic placement of a large and distinctive CTA (call to action) button
• Using interesting and visually appealing images
• Making sure that the main text clearly explains the offer and is going from general to detailed description as the reader moves down the page

Now, let’s list the specific requirements for Chinese landing pages along with the common mistakes that companies often make in creating them:

Chinese landing page design: do’s and don’ts

#1 Use native translation

While using native translation should be the obvious rule, a surprising number of foreign companies still cut corners on this one. Re-purposing original landing pages for Chinese market by using machine translated text or simply relying on low-quality translations would make such landing pages completely useless and counterproductive.

Always use a professional translator to write proper copy for your Chinese landing pages and make 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. Not only those Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram links will appear broken and wouldn’t even display an icon, they will significantly slow down Chinese landing page 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 landing page loading time

Loading time is almost always an issue for sites hosted outside of China. As long as your company doesn’t have a local business registration – hosting in China is not permitted. 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

It is often a good choice to have embedded videos on a landing page, however, if it is a YouTube one – it won’t work in China (YouTube is one of the blocked sites).

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. There is one caveat here however – the video will be preceded by an advertisement and those are notoriously long and can even run for up to 90 seconds. The only way to play videos without pre-roll ads is to sign up for a paid YouKu account. Although not cheap (currently RMB 5,000 per year), it would make sense to purchase if you are planning to host more videos on the platform in the future.

The last tip about the videos – if they are in English, make sure to either provide a Chinese voiceover or, at the very minimum, Chinese subtitles.

#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 landing page or, in the case of WeChat, 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.

In case you didn’t yet setup those social media account in China, at least include sharing buttons to Weibo and WeChat.

#6 Localize the contact form

If your Chinese landing page is designed for collecting users’ data, make sure that the contact form is properly translated to Chinese and don’t leave any English field names to avoid confusion.

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 landing page is extremely important for Chinese market as most traffic will come from mobile devices. It’s essential to use responsive design for your Chinese landing page ensuring that it displays correctly on most type of mobile screens.

Once the landing page is displayed on a small mobile screen, it is critical to make sure that most relevant information such as the headline and CTA (call to action) shows up “above the fold” rather than relying on users to scroll down the page.

#8 Test, test, test

Finally, your Chinese landing page is ready to go live and now you can just sit back and relax. If only that was true… The fact is that you can never be 100% sure that your page works correctly unless you, or someone else on your behalf, would test it from within China.

Although, there are some online tools available to test loading speed and accessibility of sites in China, they cannot be relied on completely as they wouldn’t show common display problems, broken links or other errors. Therefore, it is best to have someone to test your Chinese landing page in China using inspector browser option (F12 hotkey in most browsers) to note and record any errors and loading time.

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If you have spent some time looking at Chinese ecommerce websites, you can’t help but notice how incredibly cluttered they look. In fact, most of that apparent clutter is a result of link-heavy nature of Chinese internet in general.

What might strike a Westerner as an overwhelming overload of information is likely to be perceived as a content rich and intuitive site by the Chinese.

Here are just a few examples of the most popular sites in China:

Contrast it with the clean and modern look of the Western equivalents:

Chinese website designs seem to be completely avert to modern look with its extensive use of white space, large fonts and well designed color patterns.

Since, apparently it works in China, otherwise they would have “modernized” their designs by now, I became determined to find out why is that the case.

First explanation that I came across was given by Yu Gang and David Wei in their interview with CNN correspondent Kristie Lu Stout in one of CNN episodes “On China”:

The full transcript of the interview can be found here.

Another explanation on what is causing the preference towards link heavy sites in China was given by Barry Lloyd’s, President of WebCertain Asia (read the full article):

…when you go into the Chinese consumer psyche, they want to have a chaotic bazaar type experience…They want to create this shopping atmosphere

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Baidu is the Chinese version Google. It is the largest search engine and is, in terms of business interests, as diverse. Alibaba is the world largest ecommerce operator that runs Taobao and Tmall, two main shopping sites in China. Tencent is the company behind WeChat, the most popular mobile based social app, as well as QQ, the messenger service.

All three China BAT giants, however, almost never get along. In fact, the war between them often comes at the expense of users’ convenience, although everyone accepts it as another fact of life in China.

For example, Baidu blocks search results from Alibaba ecommerce sites. Tencent doesn’t allow users to open Taobao and Tmall links in WeChat browser. Alibaba blocks rival payment systems on their sites and the list goes on.

Here is our latest infographic on those three companies.

China BAT: Baidu Alibaba Tencent

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Loading speed is one of the most important metrics of a website performance and is directly linked to bounce rate (the percentage of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing on to view other pages within the same site) and search engine ranking. Typically, if takes more than 5 seconds to load a page, a visitor would be most likely to move on. Loading time within 2 seconds is considered to be the optimal.

Not surprisingly, website loading speed in China is also a major factor in website ranking with search engines like Google or, in China’s case Baidu.

Unfortunately, even if your website is loading fast in your main market such as US or Europe, it is almost certain that it will be slower in China. There are two main reasons for it: website that are physically hosted outside of China have to pass the “Great Chinese Firewall” – a set of censorship methods setup by Chinese authorities and designed to restrict internet access to websites hosted on foreign servers. The process slows down data transfers and, ultimately, affects the loading speed of foreign based websites.

How to Test Website Loading Speed in China

I’ve personally tried several of the tools that are often recommended but found the results highly unstable or plain unreliable. First the tools that are, in my opinion, don’t do a very good job. Then, at the end, there is the one that I recommend.

WebPageTest.org

This is quite popular but clearly outdated tool which is obvious from the old-fashioned design. One plus, however, is that it allows selection of different browsers to test: Chrome, Firefox, IE etc. Unfortunately, for China there is just one choice – Shanghai. This can be completely inadequate as the loading speeds across China vary quite a bit.

Last time I tried, it got stuck on me and this was all I got:

Conclusion: not recommended

Gomez Networks

This is a very basic tool, although with slightly more choices for the cities: Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Xian. Not a particularly exciting interface and doesn’t test HTTPS (only HTTP):

Conclusion: still too limited

Dotcom-Monitor.com

This tool has a much better designed interface and it allows selecting multiple locations and test them simultaneously. However, the results I got while testing Baidu.com loading in China didn’t make any sense – 4.5 sec to load the number one China’s website in Shanghai? I don’t think so.

Conclusion: unreliable

Site 24×7

This modern looking tool allows testing with several cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and Qingdao. Unfortunately, it doesn’t allow to run simultaneous tests but one by one. However, when testing website loading speed in China, the results were much more believable: Baidu’s loading time in Shanghai was 0.6 sec. Also, the tools shows some useful breakdown of loading time for different site elements:

Conclusion: acceptable but not the best

CE Cloud 360 by Qihoo

This is the tool that is local to China. It is free to use and run by Qihoo-Haosou, one of the most popular Chinese search engines. The only drawback of this one is that it is entirely in Chinese, otherwise it’s perfect.

CE Cloud not only tests the site from every province and major Chinese city but gives a color coded map of China. Hovering over a map shows a more detailed info for each location and there is a report shown at the table below with even more data.

This is by far the best tool out there for testing website loading speed in China.  Its straight forward interface ensures that even someone with zero Chinese skills can use it just fine.

Conclusion: the best

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However, recent figures from WeAreSocial presentation, (WeAreSocial is a top international digital agency), reveal that, in fact, Tencent, Chinese digital tech giant, is getting very close to Facebook in terms of total active users it serves.

Here is the slide from WeAreSocial presentation on the top global social media platforms:

For some reason, Tencent Weibo with its estimated 220 million active users didn’t make the list. Although, it is a smaller network in China, Tencent Weibo still retains significant following, especially in tier 2 and 3 cities.

If the number of active users on all platforms that belong to either Facebook or Tencent added together, it turns out that Facebook has only a slight edge over the Chinese firm, see the pie chart below:

One can argue that there is a significant overlap between some of those services, such as virtually all Facebook messenger users must also own Facebook account. The same logic applies to Tencent: practically all QZone members would have a QQ account, although the opposite is not true. So, if those adjustments are taken account, the market share tilts slightly in favor of Facebook with its 60% vs. Tencent’s 40%:

What is truly revealing in this comparison is how close the two companies really are, especially considering the fact that Facebook has been a global household name vs. Tencent which hardly anyone outside of Chine ever heard of.

Besides, given the continued China’s Facebook ban and coupled with the rate of Tencent WeChat’s accumulation of users and its worldwide expansion ambitions, it is quite possible that we may see the balance shifting toward Tencent in the near future.

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Some of the traditional strategies and approaches to online marketing which are typical to the West have to be adjusted  in order to stay effective in China. Chinese social media users do differ for Western ones in a number of important ways.

With the number of China’s internet users today being roughly double of the entire US population, knowing and taking  those factors into account in your marketing campaign becomes increasingly important.

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Two most popular Weibo platforms share a lot of similarities and both are run by two giants of Chinese internet:

• Tancent, the company behind hugely successful QQ IM service and QZone social media service;
• Sina Corp. with its principal microblog product and a few spin-offs such as Tumblr-like Sina Qing and  location based service, WeiLingDi;

In terms of registered users, Tancent Weibo is slightly ahead of Sina Weibo, 500 million vs. 400 million respectively (of course, “slightly” is a relative term in China’s case). Also, both platforms have roughly equal number of active users making Sina Weibo a more active one in proportion to its user base.

Another principal difference between both services is the fact that Sina Weibo is by far more popular in 1st and 2nd tier cities (learn more about China’s city tier system here), while Tancent Weibo has the largest penetration in 3rd and 4th tiers.

Weibo is positioning itself as a sort of CRM service by connecting users with brands in a more natural and sustainable way.

In general, both Sina and Tancent “Weibos” share more similarities than there are differences between them and both are often compared to Twitter. In reality, Chinese microblog platforms are more of a hybrid between Facebook and Twitter. For example, they allow sharing video content (Twitter has enabled this functionality only recently), 140 character limit on tweets allows to say much more in Chinese than it does in English due to different nature of the language, Weibo pages are fully functional Facebook-like ones and both services allow comments on tweets and re-tweets.

It is also very likely that both Sina and Tancent will follow similar marketing direction in their monetizing and general business strategy. Ken Hong, Sina Weibo Marketing Strategy GM, has noted a few points during his recent interview:

1. Weibo development is getting more aligned with mobile usage vs. traditional desktop-centered interface. In the past, mobile version was following the desktop one while now it is the other way around;
2. The company invests in simplifying payment methods by making them more integrated into the microblog platform itself. New features, such as payment information storage, credit based system and others will possibly be rolling out in the near future;
3. Weibo is positioning itself as a sort of CRM (customer relationship management) service by connecting users with brands in a more natural and sustainable way;
4. Sina is hoping to get more brands onboard with their loyalty programs integrated with Weibo platform. It is expected that brand loyalty and conversion rates will be increased by wooing more customers by offering coupons and discounts that are available in real time and just a click or two away;

Ken Hong has also responded to a question about growing popularity of WeChat and its possible competition with Sina Weibo and I think his answer really addressed the core difference between the two. WeChat, with its inherent mobility and instant connectivity between users, is all about keeping in touch with existing customers while Weibo, with its appealing graphic and link rich content, is geared more towards discovery of new brands and products.

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