Baidu Huobao Text Ads

The Chinese text ads on the right hand side of Baidu search engine are officially called Baidu Huobao, which are available for purchase via Baidu’s dedicated ad agencies.

Baidu Hubao is not exactly like PPC ads. You pay a fixed yearly fee, rather than cost-per-click, which is what Baidu Search Marketing currently is.

    Baidu Huobao Text Ads

There are 10 ad positions available for a keyword, on a first come first serve basis. The first advertiser who sends payment to Baidu gets the first position. The first 3 ad positions are fixed ads. Ad positions 4 to 10 rotate on a daily basis. Everyday ads on positions 4 to 9 move down one position and ad on position 10 move up to position 4.

Each Huobao ad is shown on the right hand side of Baidu and its selected partner sites for the duration of one year. Advertisers will have to pay in full (for the cost of a year) before their ads will be shown. If you have missed the purchase for the year, you will have to queue for the next period, and you are only allowed to start queuing not more than 3 months before the start of the next period.

You will be allowed 13 Chinese characters in the headline and 32 characters in the description. If you include your keywords in the ad description or headline, your keywords will be shown red.

Unlike conventional PPC, one problem with Baidu Huobao is that you have little control over the ranking of your ads by optimization. The only changes you can make are your ads and your landing pages. Also, this format of text ads does not suit mid- and small-size businesses as the upfront cost you need to pay could be expensive.

By the way, Huobao means “explosive” in Chinese. For those you can read Chinese, here is a brief description about Baidu Huobao.

Comments

5 Responses to “Baidu Huobao Text Ads”

  1. Patrick on December 6th, 2007 2:40 pm

    Nice article, thanks for sharing.
    Pat
    Shanghai

  2. Gemme on December 7th, 2007 1:29 pm

    That’s a very nice overview on how Huabao works, nice post.

    Next post on Jingjia?

  3. Bryan H on December 14th, 2007 12:32 am

    Timely post for us. We’re just starting to think about expanding our advertising to China, but it’s interesting how difficult Baidu makes it for North American companies (the site isn’t translated into English).

    Does Baidu allow North American companies to buy direct? If not, are there reputable Chinese brokers for this type of service?

  4. Xin on December 14th, 2007 11:46 pm

    Thanks for the introduction to Huabao. I almost choked when I saw the yearly keyword prices. It seems rather archaic charging it yearly when the web moves so fast.

  5. Patrick on December 15th, 2007 3:47 am

    Well, many PPC management companies in China charge a yearly cost per keyword on Adwords, while SEO companies quote a few thousands RMBs for a single keyword (without any keyword research btw…); it is clear that China still has a long way to go when it comes to best practices in the SEO/SEM industry…

    ————-
    Thanks for the introduction to Huabao. I almost choked when I saw the yearly keyword prices. It seems rather archaic charging it yearly when the web moves so fast.

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