China SEO Blog

At least for now…Let’s see how long it will hold that position or whether Yahoo will reclaime the top spot soon.

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If you have an advertising account with Baidu, you have two main options to add funds to your pay per click account:

1-Bank transfer to the local Baidu branch through which your account was opened (payment through the post is also possible)

2-Online transfer directly through your Baidu account (Baidu has a direct gateway through China Merchant Bank, or through 99 Bill, 快钱 in Chinese, which supports a certain number of domestic debit cards).

In both cases, payments are to be made in RMB (Chinese Yuans) only. International credit cards are not supported so far. Minimum amount when adding funds to the Baidu account is 1,000 yuans (as compared to 100 yuans for Google Adwords in China).

International clients in most cases will need to go through a China-based agent to add funds to their Baidu account. We do provide this service and charge 5.5% of the received amount as fees (2.5% for clients using our Baidu account management services). You simply need to wire the account in foreign currency to our Hong Kong or Shanghai bank account and the payment will be applied to your account within 5 business days.

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Long awaited ecommerce platform by leading search engine Baidu has finally started on a trial basis at the end of last month. 10,000 users are now already operating their online shops through the new C2C portal which has been hyped as the Taobao-killer.

Pending the final decision on the top domain for the new site, the new trading platform can be accessed now at коли под наемmall.baidu.com ; you will need to have a Baidu account (passport) to be able to access it.

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After months of preparation AOL has finally launched officially its new Chinese portal. It is accessible at chinese.aol.com ; I wrote earlier on this blog about whether AOL should purchase the .cn or .com.cn of their domains before launching. It seemed they chose to go the easy way, however with such a long url they shouldn’t be surprised to never make a dent in the online news industry in China. I bet the decision to use the sub-domain was taken in a corporate office in the US…

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From the new marketing materials we have received, Baidu has raised the initial advertising budget for new accounts from RMB3,000 to RMB5,000. The “consulting” fee remains the same, RMB600. New advertisers therefore are required to pay RMB5,600 (about USD824) upfront to set up a new pay-per-click account.

As a comparison Google account opening fee stands at RMB50, with prepay advertisers required to pay a minimum of RMB100 everytime they recharge their accounts.

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One of the tings mostly overlooked by advertisers, especially those not based in China and trying to promote their websites in China through pay per click (Google Adwords) is the fact that the Chinese visitors actually might just not be able to visit their websites!

One example should help. Everyone knows about Homestead.com , the popular all-in-one DIY sitebuilder + hosting platform that was quite hot in the early 2000, maybe not that much now as people become more knowledgeable in web design or for selecting a web hosting solution that better suits their needs. Homestead advertise heavily through Adwords and China is one of the markets where their ads are shown. They appear mostly for their own name and many search terms related to web hosting, wed design etc. However, Homestead.com has been blocked in China for the last two or three years at least! This means that they have been spending tens of dollars (or even more, considering that their industry has rather high CPC values) every day for years now, while those who click on the ad could not access their sites and would shut down the browser in a second. Talking about wasting resources.

Now for Homestead these might be pennies and probably they don’t care of this loss for China in their global advertising budget. However for small businesses targeting China, without the proper analytics software in place to track country of origin for their web visitors, bounce rates etc. that could have made them aware of the problem, this could be a serious hit to their bottom lines. We had a Canadian client coming to us who, after six months of “heavy” advertising in China through Adwords for their Chinese website, didn’t seem to get anything going in terms of sales or leads, and where surprised to find out that their sites couldn’t be accessed here without a proxy! And don’t count on Google to inform you of the situation, you might even be paying more than other advertisers since the high bounce rate will definitely lower your site quality score.

So, if you were to advertise through Google Adwords (or any other PPC network, for what it matters) in China, first make sure that you site can be seen here. There are online tools to check access from Chinese locations, if you know someone in China the best bet would be to ask them to test if they can visit your site. Ultimately, if your site main audience in China, you might consider hosting in China altogether, as you will get faster load times for your visitors which can be a boost for your site friendliness for users and quality score as well…But this will be for another article

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If you have been using the Adwords keyword tool for doing your keyword research, then you you will definitely like this. Now the tool provides data about number of searches conducted for each keyword. So for a certain number of suggested keywords, for instance, you will find as well the number of searches that was conducted for this keyword in the previous month, as well as the average monthly search volume.

You can read more about it on the Inside Adwords blog here:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/07/keyword-tool-updated-with-search-volume.html

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