China SEO Blog

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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Baidu has announced that it will implement measures for assisting Japanese advertisers to place ads on its PPC network.

Through the help of its Japanese unit, Japanese advertisers and ad agencies will receive advanced sales support, including translation of ad copy into Chinese and paying locally in Yens for their ad campaigns. So far, the only option for Japanese advertisers (as well us most international advertisers) to advertise on Baidu network was to open an account directly through the head office in a Chinese city and pay in RMB (Chinese Yuans).

The presence of Baidu in Japan explain this move (Baidu has just launched a couple of weeks ago its Japanese search engine baidu.jp); however, one can expect Baidu to start opening sales offices in other developped markets considering the increasing demand for advertising solutions targeting the Chinese market.

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According to a note sent to publishers based in mainland China, Google has announced that Adsense ads when clicked on will open the advertiser’s site in a new window. As a move that appears to bring the Adsense program along the specific particularities of the Chinese market (where it is usual for popular portals to open new pages on new windows, and where pop ups continue to be widely used), the reason provided was to allow users to remain on publishers sites even after clicking an ad (which will therefore appear in a new windows), not forcing them to use the Back button as it has been the case previously (and still the case out of China, I assume).

The new function should definitely benefit publishers in two ways:
1-There should be an increase of clicks to different ads from a single page.
2-The system may have been not counting as valid some of the clicks which were immediately followed by a “Back” button click to the initial page. It should not be the case now.
3-The rate of users accidentally leaving the publisher’s site should go down as well

Users experience should improve as well as they can take more time to visit advertisers sites if interested, not worrying about the site they came from since it is still available in the original window.

Advertisers may see a declining ROI under the new scheme, but overall if the users are happy and click more it should bring a higher volume of visits to their sites.

Below a copy of the email (which we received as Adsense publisher on January 10th)

尊敬的合作伙伴：

为了让您更好地为用户提供网站使用体验，我们近日发布了一项改进功能。该功能可以让用户点击的AdSense广告在新窗口中呈现，而用户不必使用浏览器的返回功能才能回到您的网站，同时也避免了用户意外离开您的网站。我们相信更好的用户体验将带来广告主更多的广告投放，给您带来更大收益。

与此同时，我们也希望您继续对网站和广告单元进行优化，以便给用户带来更好的访问体验，为您的网站带来更多收益。更多优化技巧，请访问 “帮助中心” 的 “优化技巧” 专栏 https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/static.py?page=tips.html 。

Google AdSense 小组敬上

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Alibaba.com, the parent company of Yahoo China, and one of the leading IT companies in China, has announced the launch of its own online ad marketplace, alimama.com. The new network has the potential to cause a serious threat to Google Adsense (Adcenter and Yahoo Search Marketing are virtually not an option in China). Alibaba’s own B2B websites give it a deep pool of potential advertisers (i.e. the millions of small and medium sizes enterprises that use the international and local versions of the site), and the company’s leading position in China will help it push its new system to local publishers and website owners.

The main question remains: are Chinese online advertising market ready yet? On the other hand, other than its local origin, can alimama.com really compete with Google Adsense and be profitable? There are many cases of Chinese companies ousting or beating foreign counterparts due to their local comparative advantage (Alibaba’s Taobao vs Ebay, Google vs Baidu etc.), but online marketing is a relatively new field for Alibaba, and the company doesn’t have yet a leading and self-owned search engine to rely on, on the contrary to Google or Baidu.
Only time will tell and confirm the potential of the new ad marketplace. We will be following this new site through our blog.
Patrick Abotsi
www.seo4china.com

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Previously annouced for June, it seems that the new version of Yahoo Search Marketing (aka Panama) will finally be available to Hong Kong advertisers by the end of this month. According to an email that we received on July 7th, as other Hong Kong-based advertisers I guess, account upgrade will be effective from July 19 to 25th, 2007. Users have the possibility to upgrade by logging into their accounts during this period, and click on the “Upgrade Now” button to begin the upgrade process. Alternatively, all accounts which did not upgrade proactively will be automatically upgraded on July 26th. The advantage in the manual upgrade is the “Preview” option which enables you to familiarize with the new structure before getting started.

We will report on this in future messages on any improvement that the new version offers over the last one that was, to say the least, a little backward compared to what Google or even other second-tier or third-tier PPC networks do offer. I wonder if they have included geotargeting in their new system, allowing to advertise on other regions (or even in mainland China) directly from Hong Kong without the need to set up a separate account for every specific country. But from what I have read on the blogosphere on Panama upgrades elsewhere I have small hopes for that…
Patrick Abotsi
www.seo4china.com

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