Investing in Baidu search products will help with increasing your ranking on Baidu search engine. According to Baidu official website, Baidu has three main advertising products which are Paid Search, Brand Link and Contextual Ads.

Paid Search

Baidu’s paid search is similar to Google AdWords. You can choose keywords that your potential customers may use to search for your products or services.

Where are Paid Search Ads displayed and what do they look like?

(The Paid Search Ads for “上海律师” – “Layers in Shanghai” are displayed on the top and the right)

Your ads are displayed on the top or the right of those related search result lists. You will see there is a Chinese word “推广” which means “Promotion” followed by your displayed URL.

You pay each time someone clicks your ad, it is also called pay per click or PPC. The pricing is flexible, you can choose how much to pay per click for each keyword, or you may choose the maximum daily spend option, which allows you to edit this price/budget setting at any time you like.

Brand Link

This is an advanced form of Paid Search for Branding. When a searcher runs a query on Baidu for a brand name or keyword of an offline ad, Brand Link will show at the top of the search result page with multiple lines of text/image/video and hyperlinks. Its size is 3 or 4 times bigger than the normal Paid Search ad. You will see there is a Chinese phrase “品牌推广” which means “Brand Promotion” followed by your displayed URL.

Where are your Brand Link Ads displayed and what do they look like?

(Brand Link for “可口可乐” – “Coco Cola” in China)

A Brand Link campaign shows:

1. Brand and slogan
2. Videos
3. Animation
4. Multiple product photos
5. Latest news
6. Social media
8. Deep links

With eye-catching images/videos alongside, no one will miss it! All these options will maximize clicks and conversion rates. There is no equivalent of this on any other search engines. Impressively, Brand Link campaigns deliver average click through rates (CTR) of 50%. It is a great way to increase your brand awareness.

Contextual Ads

These are contextual text ad/image ad within Baidu affiliate websites. Research shows that internet users spend only 5% of their online time on search engines and 95% on content rich web pages. Baidu, with advanced search engine technology, has analysed and indexed over 60 millions pages of content in thousands of Baidu affilitate websites and enables ads to be shown on contextually relevant web pages based on the tracking data Baidu collect, including where web users go, what sites they visit, what search terms they use and what they say on social networks. In this case the advertising clients can easily target the right audience for their products or services.

Where are Contextual Ads displayed and what do they look like?

(The Contextual Ads are displayed on one of Baidu affiliate websites “天空下载” – “skycn”)

Baidu provide advertising clients a tool to create contextual ads, ie. image ads, flash ads, text ads. Advertising clients can easily to create ads by using templates.