With the new domain now live we will be posting more frequently articles on search marketing/internet marketing in China and beyond.

The Management

Sinotraffic.com

1-Bank transfer to the local Baidu branch through which your account was opened (payment through the post is also possible)

2-Online transfer directly through your Baidu account (Baidu has a direct gateway through China Merchant Bank, or through 99 Bill, ?? in Chinese, which supports a certain number of domestic debit cards).

In both cases, payments are to be made in RMB (Chinese Yuans) only. International credit cards are not supported so far. Minimum amount when adding funds to the Baidu account is 1,000 yuans (as compared to 100 yuans for Google Adwords in China).

International clients in most cases will need to go through a China-based agent to add funds to their Baidu account. We do provide this service and charge 5.5% of the received amount as fees (2.5% for clients using our Baidu account management services). You simply need to wire the account in foreign currency to our Hong Kong or Shanghai bank account and the payment will be applied to your account within 5 business days.

Pending the final decision on the top domain for the new site, the new trading platform can be accessed now at коли под наемmall.baidu.com ; you will need to have a Baidu account (passport) to be able to access it.

As a comparison Google account opening fee stands at RMB50, with prepay advertisers required to pay a minimum of RMB100 everytime they recharge their accounts.

One example should help. Everyone knows about Homestead.com , the popular all-in-one DIY sitebuilder + hosting platform that was quite hot in the early 2000, maybe not that much now as people become more knowledgeable in web design or for selecting a web hosting solution that better suits their needs. Homestead advertise heavily through Adwords and China is one of the markets where their ads are shown. They appear mostly for their own name and many search terms related to web hosting, wed design etc. However, Homestead.com has been blocked in China for the last two or three years at least! This means that they have been spending tens of dollars (or even more, considering that their industry has rather high CPC values) every day for years now, while those who click on the ad could not access their sites and would shut down the browser in a second. Talking about wasting resources.

Now for Homestead these might be pennies and probably they don’t care of this loss for China in their global advertising budget. However for small businesses targeting China, without the proper analytics software in place to track country of origin for their web visitors, bounce rates etc. that could have made them aware of the problem, this could be a serious hit to their bottom lines. We had a Canadian client coming to us who, after six months of “heavy” advertising in China through Adwords for their Chinese website, didn’t seem to get anything going in terms of sales or leads, and where surprised to find out that their sites couldn’t be accessed here without a proxy! And don’t count on Google to inform you of the situation, you might even be paying more than other advertisers since the high bounce rate will definitely lower your site quality score.

So, if you were to advertise through Google Adwords (or any other PPC network, for what it matters) in China, first make sure that you site can be seen here. There are online tools to check access from Chinese locations, if you know someone in China the best bet would be to ask them to test if they can visit your site. Ultimately, if your site main audience in China, you might consider hosting in China altogether, as you will get faster load times for your visitors which can be a boost for your site friendliness for users and quality score as well…But this will be for another article

You can read more about it on the Inside Adwords blog here:

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2008/07/keyword-tool-updated-with-search-volume.html