Baidu Search Marketing Blog Posts

Uh oh!
Baidu is now making most existing Baidu pay per click customers jump through yet another hoop.
Here's a translated excerpt from the official announcement:

"
In order to further strengthen an honest marketing environment on Baidu search as well as provide the most benefit for searchers and advertisers, Baidu launched an authenticity verification initiative in 2012. This initiative effectively helped advertisers improve the reliability of their advertisements. The initiative now applies to the majority of Baidu clients. Read more...

I recently talked to somebody that had setup a new business and they wanted some guidance on this question:
"Which marketing channel would be better for us at the beginning: Pay per click or SEO?"
I'll answer this in a way that's relevant to English and Chinese marketing.

First of all, let me say that there is no one-size fits all answer to the question of pay per click (PPC) vs. SEO. It depends on the situation. Read more...

Traffic Now or Traffic Later...

Some of the most common questions I hear from website owners that are considering entering the Chinese market are about hosting and domain names. Questions like “Do I need to host my site in China?”, “Should I use a .cn, .com.cn or something else?” and “Will my site get blocked?” Read more...

I received an email asking: “What type of tools are useful for testing broad/exact search volumes (including long tails) for China?”

For this question, I’ll assume that we’re talking about keyword research for a new market, so using data from existing websites isn’t possible.

Here are the 4 tools we use the most.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Google’s keyword tool is an industry standard for English keyword research, and it’s quite useful for Chinese as well. Read more...

I found this question on Quora: “How does Baidu compares to Google when it comes to display ads rather than search ads?”

Good question.

First some background… Read more...

This week I posted two new items on sites other than East-West-Connect. Check them out. :)

5 Baidu SEM Tips From the Pros on Clickz.asia - In this article, I listed 5 tips tailored towards the Baidu paid search newbie. Clickz.asia is a blog with marketing news and marketing advice for China and other Asian countries. Read more...

For an SEO project, it's important to check up on a regular basis and make changes where needed. For most projects, I do this on a weekly basis. Read more...

Below are some of the most common questions I'm asked about Baidu advertising account setup. Note that some details may vary based on the reseller. Much of what I describe below is how we do things at Nanjing Marketing Group, and we work with several resellers. Read more...

This is meant to be a thorough, informative guide to Baidu Analytics, also known as Baidu Tongji or 百度统计. Google Analytics has been used as the basis of comparison since it is the most used web analytics tool in the English-reading world.

This guide will be updated periodically.

It was last updated on: Mar 1, 2013.

Reasons to use Baidu Tongji

Before you decide whether or not you’d like to use Baidu Tongji, consider some of the benefits it provides. Read more...

Somebody recently asked me:

Would Baidu's advertising platform would be a good way to reach Chinese-reading Internet users based in Australia?

To answer this, it's important to know how much Baidu search traffic there is in Australia. For that matter, how much Baidu search traffic is there outside of China in total? How about USA, the UK, Canada?

To answer these questions, I dug into some statistics for 10 websites. Over the timespan I checked, there were 58,000 visits via Baidu.

This is what I found: Read more...