Baidu Advertising – What You Need to Know?

For those who are doing business in China or planning to expand their existing business in China, Baidu advertising is the basis for marketing. Since Google has its minimal presence in China, Baidu does all the work for businesses when it comes to internet marketing because of its hold on more than 70% of the total market. Chinese digital marketing depends a lot on Baidu, and it is closely monitored by the government. This means the companies from outside China, need to go through a lot of legal work and Baidu make sure that things happen smoothly for them. It is the most developed online platform in China for marketing and has the essential security policies and measures properly working to protect the information and the privacy of both the business and the user. Baidu uses the concept of PPC (pay per click) just like Google uses the AdWords, though there are various differences in the way they both operate.

Originally Baidu was not an individual portal; instead, it provided search services to other portals. It then wanted to improve the search experience for Chinese users which meant more investment on the technology which those portals were unable to pay. Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, then launched it as an independent site and continued to develop it as a platform for not only internet search but also for digital marketing in China. Later it introduced various other services such as Baidu maps, Baidu cloud, Baidu knows in addition to its search platform. Baidu was opened to the public on August 5^th, 2005 with a small number of shares at really low cost, and was initially funded by Silicon Valley, but it eventually grew to around 350% in just five years. Ever since, it has been expanding itself from internet surfing to digital marketing and has reached the mobile users as well. While Baidu stands number one in China, it is also the fifth most popular search engine in the world. Therefore, Baidu advertising does not only serve the business in China but may also help in the rest of the world as well. Baidu means ‘countless times’ in Chinese, and it got this name after Robin Li got inspired by an 800-year-old Chinese poem where the last line of the poem describes that the poet searched for his beloved thousand times in the crowd. He wanted the name that is related to the word ‘search’ and should be from mandarin so that Chinese people could understand and relate well to it.

The Chinese marketing research agencies have found out that a business is not considered renowned or big enough if it is not present on Baidu. Therefore, if a business does not show up on Baidu, people tend to purchase fewer products even from its stores. Despite of the cultural difference and the language challenges, a business cannot deny the fact that China also provides a huge market for the business and thus many western brands are working on how to use Baidu advertising for maximum profits. Another important thing that businesses need to keep in mind is that Chinese people search in Mandarin instead of English and thus having a website in the Chinese language could be an added advantage to make the most of the Chinese market by making ranking good on the SERP. Baidu provides an index called Zhishu that helps in approaching the online marketing for it provides an insight into the volume of search done using the particular keyword. Then there is keyword planner that shows the volume of search for a particular keyword in a particular time period. Similarly, the Baidu analytics is a web statistic tracking system that allows the business to monitor that how many people are visiting the website and what is directing them to their website and when is the maximum turnover of the users. This works in a similar way as the Google analytics work and help the business in deciding the strategies to target their potential customers.