百度营销手册（英文版）.pdf

The Baidu Marketing Playbook: Dos thats more than 2.5 times the number of US users. Marketers today have an unprecedented opportunity to perform precise targeting at scale and establish enormous brand presence. The largest digital platform in China and the fourth-largest in the world is Baidu, which combines search, social, music, videos, images, an encyclopedia function, and a Q but it also helps consumers to improve their interactions with the brand on their mobile journeys. It is worth mentioning that, in China, data plans are rarely unlimited and mobile data is still expensive for some users. As such, serving pages of two megabytes doesnt make a lot of sense to them and could very well alienate the consumer. As of Q1 2017, Alipay reached a mobile payment market share of 54 percent, while WeChat Payment accounts for 40 percent. The size of the mobile payment market has reached 12.8 trillion per quarter (Figure 3). Figure 2. If your only available payment methods are credit card, Google Pay, Apple Pay, or PayPal, you are sacrifi cing a seamless check-out process in China. And this should be among your top priorities to address. Start with your brand terms Whether or not you should bid on your brand terms is a debate that has raged on through the years in search engine marketing (SEM). The cost of paying for users who are already familiar with your brand has been countered by the value of incremental sales and the protection of brand visibility. With Baidu, these values are even more signifi cant. Brand keyword value is high in Chinas SEM landscape and is most eff ective when using Baidu Brand Zone, which will be discussed later in this paper. When entering Chinas market, it is easier to test the eff ectiveness of pay per click (PPC) with brand terms if you are a brand that is known globally in your niche. If the return on ad spend is good enough, you can quickly ramp up with other non-brand keywords. This exercise is necessary to ensure your website/landing pages are working properly. Figure 3. Baidu Dos and Donts 7 4 M.analysys. (2017). Analysys: Chinas third-party payment in the first quarter of 2017 Mobile payment market transaction size 1,88091 million yuan. online Available at: m.analysys/point/detail/1000762. html Accessed 23 Aug. 2017.Figure 4. Baidu Dos and Donts 8 Leverage premium ad formats Premium ad formats are those ad formats developed from the regular text-based ad format. They usually include image(s), sitelinks, or interactive controllers on the search engine results page (SERP). The benefi t of using premium ad formats is in the return of a high click-through rate (CTR). The massive and powerful Baidu Brand Zone, for example, can return a CTR up to 80 percent on the SERP, driven by intent of the search query. Brand Zone (which covers up to 300 brand terms) can save you money on brand terms, because, rather than CPC, it is priced as a at monthly fee. Brand Zone also helps you secure the most traffi c out of your brand queries, due to dominance of brand terms. Furthermore, due to its enormous size, Brand Zone pushes your competitors ads below the fold, eff ectively protecting your brands visibility. Figure 4 is an example of a Brand Zone result for Ctrip. Baidu Brand Zone has several customizable elements on both the left and right columns. As depicted in the example, your results can include a thumbnail of your logo, site links, and a widget of tabs and forms. Brand Zone delivers a brand image of credibility, and it shortens the click stream for your audience with the web forms and site links. On a mobile SERP, Brand Zone usually takes up the whole above-the-fold space with other elements, such as an app-download button and call extension. Apart from Brand Zone, Baidu has many other ad formats. Each of these may have a few elements of Brand Zone. These are called Fengchao, and they are all cost-per-click formats. Yet, most of the time, they can only be triggered when your ads are sitting at the top slot of the SERP. What better reason to bid higher for that slot? Ramp up with competitor terms and URL biddings It may be a big “dont” in the AdWords world to bid your competitors brand terms. They are expensive, as the quality scores are usually low, which re ects the low CTR. However, you may rethink this strategy when planning your Baidu PPC strategies. As explained, the top ads will have an advantage of a much larger space, which makes it easier to take over the traffi c of any brand. Moreover, while Chinese consumers are loyal in some categories, like infant formula, diapers, milk, and beer, this isnt true across all categories. If your ads are refi ned with the correct messages and have an acceptable CTR, bidding your competitors terms should be adopted as your second most valuable keywords set.Baidu Dos and Donts 9 Late last year, Baidu launched its most powerful tool for taking over your competitors SEO momentum, called Baidu Industry Bidding or URL Bidding. Merkles Dossier 8.1 includes an in-depth article introducing this feature. Imagine the power of placing your ads on top of every SERP, where your competitor is only showing an organic impression. Plan your organic strategy earlier In the digital world, everythings moving so fast, its impossible to stay ahead of the game. Marketers are constantly pursuing shortcuts and quick wins just to keep pace. Those are the moments when we may overlook our investment in organic search traffi c. And it could be a nearly irreversible misstep, if the search engines see your website as an English language site or a “bad” site of no value. Once you have been red- agged, it takes far more eff ort to rebuild your impression/reputation. Nowadays, organic traffi c accounts for approximately 30-40 percent of a websites total traffi c. Nonetheless, many digital marketers, particularly international ones, still believe in the myth that SEO in China is the same as in the US, or that organic traffi c can be built later in the process. You need to prioritize your investment in organic, because the earlier you invest, the more you benefi t. And your China SEO must be supported by a dedicated strategy, from technical SEO to content (Figure 6). Partner with a strong agency with deep expertise and scalability To implement your digital marketing strategy in China, you need someone who not only speaks your language, but also understands your needs in the local market. This agency will lead you through the necessary paperwork and many other unexpected processes you would need to tackle in your digital strategy implementation. It is not just about fi nding a partner that can do search, display, video, and social for you. It must also off er a sophisticated technical dimension, with the ability to build your marketing stack on data. Figure 6. Figure 5. 10 Baidu Dos and Donts When you are investing in digital marketing in China, even though its a di erent landscape, remember, you can always bene t from more data.The Donts Baidu Dos and Donts 11 Dont “spray & pray” or “set & forget” When you are investing in digital marketing in China, even though its a different landscape, remember, you can always benefit from more data. Your success depends on how well you set up your infrastructure for first-party data through web/media analytics and your ability to find a specific piece of data from certain data source. For example, the organic search query data isnt available through the referrer. It is just like Googles Not Provided. However, you can still collect the information from Baidu Analytics, aka Baidu Tongji. By setting up the conversions, you may get some insights on how those keywords are driving conversions and revenue. Integrating data from a variety of resources can be extremely challenging. But “spray and pray” or “set and forget” are not the answer for establishing your digital footprint in China. Fortunately, you are still able to use the data collection and analysis tools that you are familiar with in China. A frequently asked question from overseas advertisers is, “Does Google Analytics Dont use Google Fonts, Twitter/Facebook scripts or YouTube embeds The first and most common pitfall weve seen in Chinas internet is international brands using Google Fonts, Twitter/Facebook scripts, and YouTube embeds in their web pages. Not only will those elements slow down the loading of the web pages, their use is widely restricted in mainland China. Due to the difference of the digital landscape and the size of Chinese fonts, you may want to make those adjustments for your Chinese pages. Specify the Chinese font family in your CSS style sheets, without external links to font files. Use QR codes for desktop pages for readers to scan and share via WeChat. Use Sina Weibo share buttons. If you want to embed video on third parties or livestream, use YouKu, Tencent, or Baidu video. There are some libraries for static resources you can use. Just to name a few of them: useso/ cdn.code.baidu/ lib.sinaapp/Baidu Dos and Donts 12 / Google Tag Manager work in China?” The answer is yes and no. It works like a charm for Google Analytics (GA) to collect data on your website or in your apps. The tags are very reliably triggered by Google Tag Manager (GTM). Its just that accessing the GA reporting interface and GTM backend directly in the GFW arent allowed. But you are already outside of the GFW. Dont lose your agility Agility here has two diff erent meanings. First, digital marketing in China requires substantial attention to formalities. You may have heard of the ICP license. There are other documents you many need, depending on the industry you are in and the products/ services you are off ering. Some verticals, such as healthcare, may not even be allowed to advertise on search engines without proper licenses. When dealing with media in China, same-day response is sometimes required for legal. Because of that, you need to tune your expectation a bit and work actively with your agency. Second, you need to try diff erent approaches quickly. China is very successful in terms of mobile internet and e-commerce. Sheer volume makes it a huge lab, and you can get fast results most of the time, making it easier to quickly evolve. Try more, start small, and fail faster are the principles for evaluating those new digital options with which you are less familiar. Again, never lose your agility, as your competitors and target consumers are moving fast. Dont take it for granted that everybody speaks the same language Mandarin is certainly the lingua-franca in Greater China. If you want to make safe copywriting, it is what you are going for. However, marketing is also about personalization. For example, rhotic accent( ) is commonly seen and preferable to use for north China. Some terms also have diff erent expressions. For example, privacy is called “ ” in mainland China but “ ” in Hong Kong. Another example is fermented tofu is called “ ” around Shanghai but “ ” in other regions. Taiwanese say “ ” for “ ” (bargain). In the western world, when segmenting audience by age, we use generational segments, such as baby boomers, digital natives, and Generation X, Y (millennials), and Z for the demographic cohorts. In China, we commonly use pre-60, post-60, post-70, post-80, post-90, etc. Each group/generation reacts diff erently to your marketing messages. Be aware that you may need to customize your creative to the specifi c target group with which you want to resonate with your messaging. You dont need to worry about those nuances in most cases. But remember that you need to let native speakers proofread your copywriting before it goes out, especially when you want to have further personalization in your regional campaigns. Dont waste time on channels/tactics that are less cost-eff ective Time is money. Its obvious that a 100 percent increase in conversion rate is a gleaming success, right? The answer is, it depends. What if that achievement was a result of six months spent working on a channel that generates $2,000 a month? Not so impressive anymore. Spending valuable time and resources working on low-priority channels or low-volume products is ineffi cient and ultimately counter-productive. Usually, such eff orts are very diffi cult to scale (Figure 7).