The new gold mine for Brands in China … Cookies and the opportunities to retarget their audience.
Our Specialist Re-Targeting Agency
China has a huge internet marketplace which is continuously optimized it’s 850 million online users. In recent years, China’s search engines have optimized strongly for retargeting and remarketing to different groups with the development of a series of better-remarketing tools for tracking and displaying content to traffic that has already reached your site once.
China’s leading search engine is Baidu (think China’s Google) with a whopping 75% of online research conducted via this platform. In China, approximately 40% of visitors are reached through ‘re-targeting’.
WHAT IS RE-TARGETING AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of ‘bounced traffic’ after they leave your website. For most websites in China, only 2-4% of web traffic converts on a user’s first visit.
Retargeting is a tool designed to help companies reach the 96-98% of users who don’t convert right away.
HOW DOES RETARGETING WORK?
Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses a simple code to anonymously ‘follow’ your audience all over the Web.
Essentially you place a small, unobtrusive piece of code on your website (this code is sometimes referred to as a pixel). The code, or pixel, is completely invisible to your site visitors and won’t affect your site’s performance.
Every time a new visitor comes to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. Later, when your tracked visitors browse the Web, the cookie identifies the visitor and allows your retargeting agency to know when and where to display ad content.
This process ensures that your ads are served only to people who have previously visited your site. It’s focusing on more qualified traffic.
Retargeting is so effective because it focuses your advertising spend on people who are already familiar with your brand and have recently demonstrated interest. That’s why most marketers who use it see a higher ROI than most other digital channels.
WHEN DOES RETARGETING WORK?
Retargeting is a powerful branding and conversion optimization tool, it works best if it’s part of a larger digital strategy.
Retargeting works best in conjunction with inbound and outbound marketing or demand generation. Strategies involving content marketing and targeted display are great for driving traffic, but they don’t help with conversion optimization.
Retargeting can help increase conversions, but it can’t drive people to your site.. it is the second step. The traffic has to be driven initially through intelligent strategy.
Your best chance of success is using one or more tools to drive traffic and then retargeting this (potentially multiple times) to get the most out of that traffic.
HOW DO I DRIVE TRAFFIC INITIALLY?
The best ad strategies in China are to set up a quality Mandarin landing page and engage in PPC (pay-per-click) advertising on Baidu with a set of 15-30 key character search terms. You can also engage in some banner ads, however, PPC in China remains the most effective solution.
You can also optimize the natural search results with an SEO strategy to increase your site’s ranking by generating Chinese content, building backlinks, and increasing your level of referencing in forums and news sites. This is not an instant solution as it takes time to rank but will drive the most qualified traffic, thus making re-targeting even more effective.
BAIDU VS GOOGLE RE-TARGETING
When these two search engines are compared, they both use a similar structure of ad campaign in terms of three core levels, these are; campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. Both Baidu and Google AdWords are based on cost per click and keyword quality.
Google’s AdWords is more advanced than Baidu in terms of accessing data from traffic initially driven (for the purposes of re-targeting). Baidu does not connect clicks to conversion, which makes further keyword analysis & optimization more difficult. It also is a more ‘clunky’ system to use for marketers.
ADVANTAGES OF BAIDU
What makes Baidu different is its ability to target an audience specifically. It not only helps you to create a list and target the audience or specific visitor groups for marketing, but it can also target specific products when setting up a remarketing campaign. So if you use “buy ski” to look for winter sports at Baidu, a sports shop can remarket the winter sports gear on the visited page banners with special offers for ski equipment.
‘Baidu Trend’ does, however, allow you to compare several keywords and their demand. It also allows you to get the trend on several devices such as mobiles or desktop computers. It allows you to target a specific timeframe, and the audience demographic to narrow down results.
This tool also provides on-demand radar for search queries relevant to the campaign. In addition, a top-line analysis breakdown can be obtained of the related search queries and each of their growth indexes.
To conclude, re-targeting in China is an important aspect of any intelligent campaign to support your branding & marketing efforts.
If your business is looking to expand into the Chinese market please contact us for more information and an in-depth discussion.
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