Good news for companies that want to advertise on Baidu. Baidu has changed the rules of the game for advertising on its portal (SEM or pay-per-click).
For those unfamiliar with the internet market in China, Baidu is the country’s best-known and most widely used search engine. It currently has 530 million unique monthly users who make more than 10 million queries a day. Baidu isn’t only used by Chinese people living in China: Chinese communities abroad also use it every day for their searches.
SEO and advertising on Baidu
Advertising on Baidu (Baidu tui guang – 百度推广) works very much like Google AdWords. The biggest difficulty, however, is the huge number of tools it offers, all of them only in Mandarin Chinese. Also, Baidu gives SEM so much weight (or wants to earn a bit more money) that it sometimes shows up to 7 ads on the left, so in your first search you see only ads and no organic results.
The change Baidu has made is that, until now, it only allowed companies registered and headquartered in China to run SEM. This severely restricted foreign companies wanting to import products into this market.
From now on, the rules have changed and any foreign company can advertise on the portal, after passing a few filters set by the search engine. Companies wishing to advertise can do so under the umbrella of a Baidu Partner (such as TRILOGI).
The change is so significant that Baidu has even opened an office in the US to reach that market.
If you want to sell in the Chinese market, Baidu is undoubtedly the gateway. At TRILOGI, we offer online marketing services for the Chinese market through our Beijing office.
Here is a chart so you can see how strong Baidu is in China.
