A Complete Guide to Baidu Paid Advertising

Baidu is China’s biggest search engine by a long shot – holding 78 per cent of the search engine market share. Think of it like China’s equivalent to Google. In turn, Baidu paid advertising is similar to any Google Adwords campaign that most of us in the western world are familiar with.

Using Chinese advertising platforms is key if you wish to target a Chinese audience. In this blog, we’ll outline how Baidu plays a huge part in the world of advertising in China, and how your business can utilise Chinese media buying for Baidu.

How Baidu Works

In order to understand how to advertise on Baidu, we have to understand how it works as a platform. While it is quite similar to Google as far as search engines go, it has some very unique aspects that we’ll uncover throughout the article.

First, let’s cover the basics. Baidu essentially works in the same way as Google, in that you type in your keywords and get a list of relevant results. The first 4 results that come up on Baidu are allowed to be paid advertisements, and after that they occur organically according to their ranking position. Related products show up on the right-hand side of the search results.

Just like Google, Baidu expands to a whole range of search and community services – only that some of these are unique to China and Baidu. This includes image search, maps, Baidu music, Space (A social network) and many, many more.

Types of Baidu Paid Advertising

Through Baidu you can pay to advertise your business in a number of ways.

The most common advertising method is Baidu Tuiguang – their version of Pay Per Click Advertising similar to Adwords. These advertisements appear at the top of the SERP when you search for relevant keywords. Baidu also offers Pay for Placement advertisements which do not exist in Google. They work the same as PPC ads in that you have to bid on keywords, but on top of that, you’re also allowed to buy the right to have priority ranking for these keywords.

Baidu PPC advertising allows you to use 50 characters in a title, and then 2 lines of text with 80 characters each. Depending on how close to the top of the search you are, Baidu may cut off the second line of text. This means you only have 80 characters usually to make what you want your brand to say count. Bear in mind, you should be writing your ads in Chinese characters, not English, so 80 characters should more than enough.

As well as the regular types of paid advertising, Baidu also allows users to advertise on external apps and other Baidu services through Baidu Pro Theme. This service is available for Baidu union members, and it allows advertising on music apps, maps, desktop apps and more. For example, in Baidu News you are able to pay to have an advertisement embedded within the organic news results. The BaiduTV platform is also available and is great for video-based advertising.

Why Your Brand Should Use Baidu Paid Advertising

One major difference Baidu has to Google is that in many places where Google promotes organically ranking content, Baidu will promote paid advertising a lot more. This means it is much harder to rank organically on Baidu even if your website is optimised properly. If companies want to get leads out of search engine ranking in China, there is much more incentive to pay for advertisements to secure a place at the top of Baidu search.

Baidu is also different as it primarily targets locations that speak Chinese. The amount of traffic they gain from Chinese speaking countries avalanches any other search engine. This makes it much more effective at gaining your brand an audience from these locations. If your brand is looking to gain leads from Chinese locations, Baidu is really the only search engine to use.

Last but not the least, Baidu paid advertising allows you to target your audience much more heavily than Google does. As well as targeting a Chinese audience where you were not able to without Baidu, you are also able to target exactly the right kinds of Chinese audiences that will respond positively to your product. Baidu does this by having options for device, geographical and scheduled targeting, as well as interest and search behaviour targeting.

Let Star China Help You with Baidu Paid Advertising

At Star China, we are experts at Chinese media buying, and have an experienced team of Baidu paid advertising specialists on our side. This means we have all the tools and expertise needed to create your brand a successful Baidu paid advertising campaign.

If you want your business to thrive in the world of Chinese advertising, talk to us today! Contact info: 1300 228 525 Email: info@starchina.com.au