Baidu PPC recently upgraded its Geo-Targeting settings to prefecture-level, which means advertisers could target specific cities of a province for campaigns and ad groups.

The picture above shows how to set up prefecture-level geo-targeting. First, when you login to your Baidu PPC account, click Search Network, then you will be led to a Search Network new page, click the last tab on the top to enter Search Network Management Interface. Below your account name, you could find your account level settings. Click the second link to change geo-targeting settings. Choose the second option on the pop-up box, which means you could select a certain region for geo-targeting. Then you will see a list of provinces in China. For example, if you hover your mouse over Shanxi province, you could see a list of prefecture-level cities, then you could tick the check-box to choose the specific cities you want to target. It’s by default target all cities in the province.

Prefecture-level geo-targeting could help advertisers get higher quality visitors and decrease the low-conversion visitors with higher conversion rate; it could also reduce impression cost, therefore reduce conversion cost.

Baidu also gives suggestions for different types of advertisers to use prefecture-level geo-targeting more effectively.

First, for advertisers with business covering one city or several cities, using prefecture-level geo-targeting means the drop of impression and click times and the number of visitors. Conversion rate will not improve, either. Simply using prefecture-level geo-targeting without optimization could not achieve the best effect.

The chart shows that after using prefecture-level geo-targeting, impression drops from 200,000 per day to 50,000 per day. The conversion rate of impression to inquiry (before) equals to 1000/200,000=0.005, and the conversion rate (after) equals to 400/50,000=0.014. Conversion cost of inquiry (before) equals to 1000/15,000 yuan=0.067 times/yuan, and the conversion cost (after) equals to 400/8,000 yuan=0.05 times/yuan.

The conversion rate increases and conversion cost drops, but the actual number of conversions does not increase. How to improve conversions without increasing budget? The answer is to increase traffic volume. You could optimize following the suggestions on the chart below.

Second, for advertisers with business covering a province, several provinces or the whole nation, you could combine city advertising performance analysis with prefecture-level geo-targeting to achieve precise marketing.

The previous geo-targeting is to use the same budget, bid, keyword and ad copy for all provinces. However, different cities’ businesses vary, traffic value differs and bid competition is not the same. Prefecture-level geo-targeting will do better in precision marketing. For example, Nanjing has a new promotion campaign which requires new ad copies and specific landing page; Suzhou’s bid competition is higher than national average, so you need to increase bid price; Wuxi has higher conversion rate, you should allocate more budget in Wuxi, add more keywords to improve impression.

You could optimize following the steps on the chart below.

Recently Baidu launched a new tool, conversion bid tool to improve PPC advertising conversions on Baidu.

Conversion bid tool predicts the conversion rates of different traffic by calculation. It could set a higher bid for the higher conversions to get more clicks and conversions, and set a lower bid for the lower conversions to avoid the invalid clicks. The tool could help users to optimize the ad campaign settings, and get more conversions with the fixed cost.

This tool supports four types of conversions:

• Conversions set in Baidu Analytics
• Conversions in Baidu Shangqiao, Baidu’s online chat tool
• Continuous visits to deeper pages after landing
• Conversions set in other third party tracking software

Click here to get more information about Conversion bid tool.

Baidu joined with China Consumers’ Association and launched Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Plan. When Baidu log-in users click Baidu PPC and Baidu content network advertisements, they can get full refund of their total lost money from Baidu.

 Limited Coverage

Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Plan is limited to users who satisfy all the requirements below at the same time:

1.  The user should have registered a Baidu account, and must be an individual
2.  The loss occurred when the user have already logged in to his or her Baidu account and clicks a Baidu PPC or Baidu content network ad
3.  The user clicks a link with Baidu PPC or Baidu content network promotion logo, and buy products or services on the website which leads to economic losses

   For example, in Baidu search results, ads with Baidu PPC promotion are marked with logo, which is shown below.
   Baidu content network ads have three features, which are:
   1) with a white or grey Baidu logo
   
   2) If you click on Baidu logo, you will be linked to Baidu content network official website: http://wangmeng.baidu.com/
   3) If you put your mouse on an ad, you will see a url at the bottom of your browser, beginning with http://www.baidu.com/cpro. or http://cpro.baidu.com/cpro

Settlement

1. File your complaint in your Baidu account.
   
   You need to fill in all the required documents to hand in the complaint to Baidu.
2. Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center would contact with you and the website, give its feedback within five working days. If Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center couldn’t settle the complaint, the user could apply to People’s Meditation Committee or China Consumers’ Association for meditation. It is no longer limited to five working days.
3. When the meditation comes out from Baidu Netizens Interests Protection Center or People’s Meditation Committee, or China Consumers’ Association, the user could get his or her compensate accordingly.

Exposure

Baidu exposure is a platform for netizens to report phishing and other fraud websites. By September 2 2013, Baidu has settled 3,743 fraud cases which were reported by netizens, and blocked about 16 million fraud websites in total.

The picture above shows the number of exposure by netizens from July to August in 2013.

Baidu awarded million dollar prize to two teams, one of them was speech search engine team. This is the first time when an end-user oriented team won the prize.

Baidu’s million dollar prize is set up by CEO Robin Li, mainly for employees whose position are below director levels. The team should be limited to a maximum of 10 persons. The prize would be awarded to teams which have made innovations and breakthroughs in significant projects, far beyond expectations. The number of winning teams is not limited, which means Baidu would give out the prize to every team achieved the criteria. The prize would give out on Baidu Annual Summer Party.

As the highest prize in Baidu, we could see its mid-term goals through the prizes. In the first two years, the prizes were awarded to realizing full potential of server, content network keyword match and Baidu PPC Phoenix Nest. In this year, one team works on advertising and budget, also focuses on business enterprises. But the speech search team is customer oriented.

Media questioned that Baidu didn’t put much effort on mobile products before. After buying Chinese app distributor 91 wireless for 1.9 billion USD, Baidu awarded mobile terminal developing team with one million dollar which showed growing importance of mobile terminal to Baidu.

Actually, in the past two years, Baidu speech search engine have supported a series of products, such as Baidu voice input, Baidu voice search and Baidu voice assistant.

iFLYTech is Chinese voice recognition software company, with 20 billion CNY market capitalization which is almost the same as Sohu. This gives us a reference for the Baidu speech recognition valuation.

Baidu is about to increase cost for unverified PPC accounts beginning from Aug 1, 2013.

• For unverified business accounts, promotion cost will increase from additional 10% to 20%.
• For unverified personal accounts, promotion cost will increase from additional 10% to 20%, no matter whether the account is authenticated or not.
• For verified accounts who have only one star credibility, promotion cost will increase 5%.

You can login to your account, by clicking the next to credibility star, you can see the details of increased cost.

It is only for customers with one star credibility and those unverified, however, customers with high credibility will see no notice but the credibility ratings:

If you are unverified or your only have one star credibility, contact your Baidu account manager to fulfill verification and credibility level increase.

The authentication and verifications are two processes Baidu implemented into their PPC system. The former requires the advertisers to submit several business documents. But PRE-QUALIFIED authenticated account can apply for verification with “V” status; otherwise, he won’t see the application link.

Verified accounts will have a “V” icon in both backend and frontend while matched and been displayed to search users: