Baidu Pay Per Click: Five Tips for a Successful Campaign

Search engines make sense of what would otherwise be an inscrutable swirl of information. Think back to the days before even AOL, when you had to manually enter the entire URL to find the site you were looking for; and before that, you had what was essentially a phonebook for domains. In short, search engines are the filters, the conditions through which we encounter our digital world—a world that increasingly has more and more bearing on our physical, material lives in social, economic, and cultural ways. This is why we feel that our preferred search engine is the internet.

Outside of North America and Europe, the biggest, most impactful search engine is called Baidu, based in China. According to Alexa Internet, Inc., Baidu is the fourth most visited site in the world, with roughly 2 billion users. In China, it is worth around 80% of the internet market share. For Western markets, the ins and outs of running successful Baidu PPC (pay per click) advertisement campaigns still remain obscure, or at least unconsidered.

A good deal of work goes into a successful online advertising campaign.

A Baidu PPC will be only one part of that campaign, and it will necessarily have to work in tandem with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques and the subsequent analysis. While SEO works to align a given product or service (your own, that is) with customers’ online queries, PPC converts such exposure into material remunerative results. Even if you’re familiar with the concept of something like a Baidu PPC campaign, a quick example may crystallize the matter. A company will pay a small fee to the search engine holder for each ‘click’ or interaction with their own content that the search engine generates as a result of that consumer’s input query. If the content of your webpage secures a sale on the query that is valued higher than the fee your company is paying to the search engine, then PPC is clearly going to be worth-while.
  
However, this will only be the case if your webpage compliments and responds to the initial customer search: this is why one of the most important parts of managing a successful Baidu PPC campaign will be to have just as strong an SEO analysis portfolio. Otherwise, you will be paying for customers who aren’t going to be attracted to your product in the first place.

This next point cannot be overstated

It goes for all manner of PPC campaigns, but especially for Baidu PPC, where the value of a native, or local, tenor and register in advertisement rhetoric is at a premium: make sure that all of your ad copy is written by professionals who are native speakers of the language in question.

Lastly, and in line with this last concern regarding communication, from the outset, establish the desired length of support tenure with your Baidu PPC campaign advisers. After all, it will do neither you nor your company any good to have a campaign developed, taught, and deployed without the service and confidence to have your advisers there if you hit a road bump along the way.