Any brand wanting to target the Chinese market will be well aware of the exclusive search engines that exist there. One of the largest and most commonly used is Baidu, more aptly the Google of China. Baidu has a strong market penetration, and like many other search engines, offers pay per click (PPC) advertising for businesses wanting to improve their discoverability and to drive paid traffic to their websites. Digital marketing agencies in China offer these services, which are affordable and useful for new brands who have very little idea about the digital landscape in the country. Read on to know more about Baidu PPC (adstochina.westwin.com/Baidu-PPC) and how these agencies help your business with respect to the same.

Account setup and planning

Setting up an account for Baidu PPC is a fairly extensive process that involves a lot of paperwork. In a bid to stay compliant with government regulations and law, Baidu mandates that companies using its platform submit a series of certificates that establish the authenticity of the businesses and that it does not operate, promote, or sell anything that is deemed illegal in China. If your business falls into restricted categories like food or medicine, you may need to produce additional documents and certificates before your account is up and running. There is also a minimum deposit that needs to be made before you can start using Baidu PPC. All of this work can be extremely taxing for a business that is new to China, but a digital marketing agency can take care of it all. In case you have an existing account, the agency can help audit that too. Once this is taken care of, the team moves onto carrying keyword and competitor research to list down keywords that your business needs to bid for. Post this, they proceed to create ad copies and setting up bids so that your ads can run smoothly.

Campaign management

Kickstarting the ads is only one part of the journey in Baidu PPC ads. In order for the campaign to be effective, it needs to be monitored, analyzed, and finely tuned on a regular basis so that the marketing objectives are met as closely as possible. Digital marketing agencies in China, once they set up your Baidu campaign, move on to monitoring its performance on a routine and often real-time basis. The first aspect of this evaluation consists of reviewing the performance of your ads against keywords selected. Often times, the ads may be performing extremely well, or in other cases, they may need a tweak to attract more traffic. In Baidu PPC, you can run multiple ads under a single campaign or to achieve a certain objective. These ads typically differ in their copy, images, and the keywords used.  However, not all of them perform in the exact same way. Some ads tend to appeal to web surfers more than the others. And when this happens, the non-performing ads need to be scrapped or modified to meet their goals. This testing and optimization task is yet another activity that the digital marketing agency performs as part of campaign management. Furthermore, they adjust the bids against keywords to that your ads display on top and attract more viewers to visit your webpage.

Analytics and reporting

The final lap in Baidu PPC is a detailed review of all ads and campaigns carried out. This is done through the analysis of various metrics related to the same. A critical metric that comes up for analysis is the website traffic – how well the ads were able to pull more viewers onto the website, and how well they were able to convert these visitors into leads or sales. This is often provided as a customized performance report by the digital marketing agency. There exist other reports, which are built into Baidu PPC, and which can be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign or to draw inferences and learnings useful for future campaigns. One such report is the keyword report, which sheds light on which keywords take up the most money, click-through rates, impressions, average cost per click and so on. The report also shows keyword information by location, thus helping to pin down areas that eat more into PPC budgets.