Most webmasters build their blogs, websites and businesses around specific audiences or niches that make it easier to compete for business and traffic. As the internet has grown, this strategy became more of a necessity than a desire. Nevertheless, most online businesses limit themselves to a particular niche AND a particular language, which can dramatically impact your brand’s ability to reach a worldwide audience. Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and provides information to hundreds of millions of users daily. If your marketing and advertising strategies have not yet reached out to this audience, then you may be missing valuable traffic, conversions and revenue. Below, we will outline the key benefits that advertising via Baidu can offer your brand.

Baidu’s Ads Are More Visible

While the platform mimics Google in many ways, one of the most profound differences from an advertising standpoint is the sheer number of premium ads that are displayed in each SERP. At the top of each page, Baidu is usually pinging lists of five to eight advertisements – none of which include the multiple advertisements listed to the right of search results. As a result of this, most Baidu users will see an entire page of relevant advertisements above the standard results. Many people do not bother with earned and owned strategies on Baidu, but paid strategies via advertising are a very lucrative way to gain exposure in a Chinese audience.

Baidu Has Different Match Types

Many people who are familiar with Google will notice that Baidu’s PPC advertising efforts are different in terms of keyword targeting. Users will be able to select one of three modes for their advertisement and its relation to keywords: broad, exact and right. These three types of keyword targeting methods can be used to ensure that your landing page keywords exactly match the SERP or broadly match the SERP. Depending on the choice, your advertisement will show up on top of results (exact) or the right of search results (broad/right).

Baidu Uses Simplified Chinese

With two different forms of Chinese out there, some search results could be difficult to target via traditional Chinese. Baidu is a simplified Chinese search engine and as such, it is relatively simple to translate and add keywords to your advertising campaigns that will be searched by members of your targeted audience. Your landing pages should be configured in simplified Chinese and match your keyword targets via Baidu in order to boost relevancy in your desired niches.

Downsides to Baidu

No honest review of Baidu’s advertising platform would be complete without the discussion of its disadvantages. While you may be ready to begin pinging lists of ads to Baidu after reading the benefits above, you will first need to pay roughly $200 (in Yuans) and show proof of business in order to gain access. In addition to this, Baidu’s interface is not compatible with many traditional analytics platforms – you will most likely need to utilize Baidu’s internal analytics instead. These two issues may be a bit disconcerting for those used to no-hassle sign-ups and custom analytics, but the target-rich audiences offered by Baidu can more than outweigh these issues for many.