China is by far the biggest market when it comes to absolute internet penetration and search volume. Since Google decided to drop out of China and redirected searches to its Hong Kong domain, Google has been steadily losing market share. The chart below from Koozai shows the breakdown of percentages per service. Make sure to read their other great posts on Baidu.

In terms of search engine preference, many of my Chinese friends including myself perform Chinese searches in Baidu and English searches in Google. Even if this is oversimplified, it reflects a general truth that Google does not really stand a chance on Chinese searches. Today’s blog post will walk you through the main steps and caveats of getting a PPC campaign live in Baidu.

Step 1: Opening a Baidu PPC Account

- Register online at the Baidu PPC platform and send out a request for account set-up, or reach to your account manager from Baidu with a request.  Also refer to the Baidu Starter Guide as a helpful resource.

- The next step is requesting an invoice to initiate the payment. With this invoice, you can the transfer account balance to Baidu, which must be at least CNY 20,000 or min $3,200. Depending on where your office is located, the entire process until your account is funded may take up to 20 days, so have some patience.

- Baidu will then send an account login and password. Log into the account interface first to immediately change your password.

Step 2: Baidu Campaign Upload

Before you start uploading, make sure you download the Baidu PPC Editor desktop application. Uploading, downloading and performance data retrieval is slower than in AdWords, so have some patience.

The basic account structure in Baidu paid search is almost equal to that in Google: there are campaigns with daily budgets and targeting settings, Adgroups with default bids, and keywords with match types. There are however some very important differences to AdWords we would like to point out here:

- Character restrictions on names: the first important difference for Baidu PPC is, that campaign names and Adgroup names can be no longer than 30 characters! All Google names would be cut off after 30 characters, which is tricky when Adgroups are long and the differentiation is only toward the end. Make sure you prepare for that by either including IDs or shortening names in some sensible manner. This requirement makes aggregation across search engines difficult, our recommendation is to append IDs before the Adgroup names and cut off after 30 characters.

- Character restrictions on ad copies: Baidu PPC allows more characters in its ad copies. While on Google we could have 25 characters for the title, 35 characters for each line of ad text (in total two lines), and 35 characters for a display URL, on Baidu paid search we can use 50 characters for the title, 80 characters for each line of ad text (in total two lines), and 36 characters for the display URL.

- Display of ad copies: Although Baidu PPC allowstwo long lines of ad text (each have 80 character limit), please note that not both of them get displayed all the time! When an ad has the highest relevancy and rank, Baidu will display it on top positions, with both lines of ad text,and mark it as “推广”. On all other occasions Baidu will only display the ad’s first line of ad text.

- Negative keywords: negatives also have an important restriction: only 100 per campaign and 100 per AdGroup are allowed! Ridiculous? Sort of, if you’re used to Google. It forces advertisers to radically focus on the most important negative terms. Ideally, if you have a balanced set of campaign-level and Adgroup negatives, then it will be easier to convert them to Baidu. The radical solution is taking the 100 shortest negatives and simply cut off the rest. This is not ideal, of course. If you subsequently add negatives through search querie reports, try to add negatives on Adgroup level.

- Keyword tracking links: if you are using proprietary tracking in Adwords for second-party reporting, sometimes advertisers use tracking links per ad text to get conversions on both ad and keyword-level, the latter being appended via a parameter through the Google ad-server redirect. For Baidu, we have to use keyword-level tracking as the Baidu ad server does not relay the keyword.

Besides these five restrictions, uploads into the Baidu PPC editor are rather similar to Google AdWords. Display and Destination URL are in different order, but this is easy to notice. The Keyword-insertion command has no “keyword:” in it, e.g. “{Software}”, so don’t forget  to remove that.

Step 3: Baidu Campaign Optimization

In case you’re using your own conversion tracking, it is essential to join data from the search engine with your conversion data. To achieve this, there are two options: a) the Baidu API or b) an automated email report that is sent to your system and parsed by an importer script. Only then you will be able to see cost per conversion or ROI. Automated reports can be set up in the scheduled report section.

In general, Baidu PPC campaign settings and features can be compared to AdWords as they were about 5 years ago. Baidu is catching up, but many key features are still missing. A key difference is, that ad delivery is always ‘accelerated’ by default - Baidu PPC cannot spread your budget evenly throughout the day. This has significant impact on small budgets, because you might only show up for 2 hours a day. This usually less important feature forces the advertiser to radically focus on a core set of keywords. We recommend running your search campaigns without broad match first or setting up a separate broad match campaign with limited spend. The Baidu account screenshot below shows how campaign online hours are difficult to control, with often only 1 hour of airtime per day.

All limitations aside, let’s look at what we can do to optimize our campaigns:

- Search Query Reports: Baidu PPC’s broad match tends to be harder to control than Google’s. We would highly advise you to control broad match via campaign budget. When mining search queries, focus on adgroup negatives, as your 100 campaign negatives are most probably already full.

- Keyword Optimization: this process is similar to AdWords, looking at high cost per conversion, high CPC, low CTR etc. No significant difference here.

- Ad Scheduling: a scheduling feature is available equivalent to Google, which is helpful if weekends are known to be less valuable. It will also prevent your budget being exhausted before 8am if the ads only start showing at that time.

- Ad Testing: We recommended writing multiple ad texts per Adgroup, and test which ad copy has the best performance. It is also essential to include your keyword into the ad copy (title and ad texts), in order to increase relevance between search terms and ads. However, our tests have shown that for non-brand campaigns, ad copies without the brand name in their titles are performing better than the ones with brand names in their titles.

Comparing Google’s to Baidu’s performance we typically see better CTRs and lower CPCs in Google, though Cost per conversions tend to be lower in Baidu. Based on CPCs, advertisers might be lured into spending 50:50 of their budget in Google and Baidu. This allocation decision really depends on your target group. If you’re selling to international, medium to large enterprises via PPC, it might make sense to give Google a higher percentage of budget in proportion to its market share. If this is not the case, Baidu paid search should get the lion’s share of budget. Ultimately, performance data of the two accounts should tell the story and drive decisions.

Below is a feature summary table for a quick overview of Baidu PPC settings.

In our next blog post, we will walk you through the basics of setting up and managing a Naver PPC account for South Korea. So stay tuned, we will reach out via FB, TW and G+!