About Baidu - Best Blogs Asia
Information about the biggest search engine in China.
Having written a post on how to submit your site to Baidu, I feel it’s time to write about the most dominant search engine in China.
About Baidu
Baidu remains the dominant search engine in China with well over two-thirds share of the market. Created by Robin Li and based in Beijing, they are a Chinese language search engine (although just recently launched a Japanese version) for websites, audio files and images. The most important factor in Baidu’s dominance is the support from the Chinese government, which regularly blocks western sites and imposes strict rules and censorship on other foreign Internet companies.
Services
Baidu offers a number of services to locate information such as,search by Chinese phonetics, stock quotes, news, weather and so on. An example is shown below:
Paid Search Campaigns
Even before Google launched Adsense, Baidu allowed advertisers to bid for ad space and then they received revenue every time a customer clicked on an ad. Small and medium-size companies loved it, the site’s traffic increased and Baidu turned a profit in 2004.
Baidu’s results are overwhelmingly influenced by paid advertising campaigns and ad spends. Paid site rankings are combined with organic search results, even for keywords which are not specifically bid upon. The popularity of Baidu’s paid advertising position means discounts and favoured pricing have been reduced and rates have increased by as much as 100% over the past year.
Generally most search campaigns in China are small-scale. Jason Lei, VP of paid search management software solution provider adSage states that 77% of advertiser campaigns on Baidu employ just 200 or fewer keywords; the average is 50 keywords or less for all advertisers. There are some major campaigns running in China, but most of these appear to be managed by agencies that have access to sophisticated systems and tools not available to most search marketers in China.
Conclusion
Baidu’s working model works well and has a loyal base of users who search for entertainment-related content. Google says it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to compete in China although it will be hard work for them to penetrate this market.
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