Upon entering a new market, advertisers are likely to face numerous challenges, including generating brand awareness and competing with existing customer loyalty to local brands. Building brand awareness in a new market can be a time consuming and tedious activity, but it’s still a necessary one.
Baidu, the search engine leader in China has sought to provide a solution that will make this process easier. A new feature released in March, named ‘Industry Target’, claims to help advertisers acquire traffic from competitors and industry leaders. According to Baidu, it only requires one simple step; by adding competitor’s websites to the campaign, Baidu will automatically identify a similar audience to those websites and show your text ads when they search for terms related to your service.
The mechanism
The feature is powered by Baidu’s database of Chinese users’ search behaviour and audience definition. With more than 10 years of data collection and development in China, Baidu has developed a relatively mature database and algorithm.
By utilising this feature, not only can Baidu identify the users who have immediate demand for your service/product, but also the users who might need your service or product in the future. For example, when dealing with a language tuition company, the Industry Target feature will search for users who are looking for language courses, those who ask questions about language courses on local forums, as well as users who are looking to go abroad to study or to work in foreign companies.
So what are some of the benefits that Baidu’s ‘Industry Target’ Feature offers? We take a look at four key ones below:
- Quick and easy exposure to target audiences
In China, users have a rather strong loyalty to local brands and forums, especially in the service industry. As a new advertiser, being able to display ads right in front of their much larger target audience, you will end up spending much less time researching
- Cost-effective acquisition
The feature offers a more cost-effective option than bidding on your competitor’s brand terms directly. We are all aware of the risks associated with entering a bidding war with your competitors. Using the Industry Target feature avoids increasing the auction price, and your competitors won’t even notice.
- Quick solution to expand keyword list
Using the Baidu keyword planner to identify new keywords can be a time-consuming process. By running an Industry Target campaign, you can quickly collect real search terms of your target audience. It also helps to identify missing areas of long-tail terms.
- Improve organic listing
According to Baidu, the Industry Target feature also helps to improve your SEO listing by boosting the position of your Baidu Quick Shot result (百度快照). This means it is more likely your SEO listing will have an image from your website displayed next to it on the first page.
The results
According to Baidu official data, they’ve seen an average of +184% uplift on traffic for the recruitment industry, a 60% drop on CPA for the education industry and a 20% lower average CPC for the beauty industry, all from using the Industry Target tool.
Do the results showcased by Baidu seem almost too good to be true? Let’s take a look at what we found from our own in-house testing.
In mid-May, we set up an industry target campaign for one of our clients in the Recruitment and Staffing sector, and the results we’ve seen so far have been quite significant.
62% more conversions than all the non-brand campaigns combined:
607% decrease in Cost Per Registration:
+24% uplift in Brand Impression without increased CPC
If you’re currently running Baidu campaigns to explore opportunities in China then this is a feature definitely worth trying. For more guidance and tips on how to optimise your digital campaigns in China, please contact us at [email protected].
