Business Geek

Anyone who knows the digital marketing landscape in China is very well aware of Baidu. This search engine, like many of its Western counterparts, offers paid advertising and promotions for brands and companies, which aim to familiarize or entice Chinese audience with their products and services. One of the most popular advertising formats available on Baidu is the PPC or Pay Per Click model, which charges you when a visitor clicks on the link to your advertisement. Using the Baidu PPC plan for digital promotions has many advantages. A few of them are described below.

Wide coverage

Baidu is the largest and most popular search engine in China, covering over 95 percent of Chinese netizens through its offerings. Its share in the Chinese search engine market is over 80 percent, with databases of billions of Chinese websites. It also receives billions of queries every day. The sheer size of Baidu and the population that it caters to allow PPC advertising on Baidu to reach a vast majority of the Chinese population and audience with ease. Any business that makes use of this model is thus guaranteed better visibility through advertisements that get displayed on the search result pages of Baidu.

Charges for clicks only

As the name suggests, PPC campaigns are charged only when a customer clicks the ad link, which typically redirects him/her to the website of the advertiser. There is no cost on impressions, or in other words, for displaying the ad on the search result page of Baidu. This makes money spent on Baidu PPC more worthwhile as you are more likely to receive a click from a potential customer than someone who is not interested in your product or service.

Better targeting capabilities

Baidu allows marketers to target their audience appropriately using keywords, which further have match types such as broad match, phrase match, synonym phrase match, exact phrase match, and exact match. Plus, it allows more characters to be inserted into the ad text than many other web search engines; a feature that is highly loved by content marketers. In addition to text, Baidu also allows for images or videos to be displayed alongside in the ads. This is particularly seen in the Baidu brand zone, where advertisers can integrate banners, social media links, and much more into a customized ad format. This makes the ads more attractive to searches and also helps improve the click-through rates. The search engine also allows you to set the location and time for your ad to be delivered, a feature that helps to effectively target audience.

Customizable promotions

While Baidu PPC ads have minimum caps, they also allow you to set your budget and a daily or weekly spending cap so that you do not exceed spends beyond what is planned. It also allows bid prices for keywords under a certain ad group to be adjusted based on a match on types. This feature adds to the flexibility of Baidu PPC promotions. In addition to the above, Baidu PPC also insights into daily search volume for specific keywords, keyword recommendation etc., which help improve conversions and click-through rates.

Extensions

Like many other search engines and their ad services, Baidu offers generic and advanced extensions to make your ad more useful and helpful to searchers. These include Sitelink to add more web links to the add, Shantou for directory and listing of products in categories and sub-categories, as well as Dynamic Callouts, which are displayed as a single sentence under the regular headline to indicate the benefits of a particular product or service. Advanced extensions include those for calls, inquiries, short forms, form submission links, and so on. All of the above-mentioned advantages make Baidu PPC a lower-cost, higher-return option for advertising and digital marketing in China. The PPC program targets customers with an intention to purchase or know more about your product or service, which leads to better visibility and higher conversion rates for your business.