Make Good Use of Baidu Bidding Ads: Fast Growth of a Panel Distributor
I first met Mr. Wu, the boss of Jiucheng, in March 2010 in his client’s company where I was giving training about online marketing to the salesmen. After hearing a few words, he invited me to his newly established company for a further talk. I went to his company, which was in an industrial area. Despite few employees, the company was well equipped with office facilities. Mr. Wu was a very straightforward person. He cut to the chase and said, “I just set up this company not long ago. The online sales is a good shortcut especially with the help of online marketing. I hope you can help us leverage all our online resources to increase sales in a short time. I will provide full support that you would during the online marketing work in both funds and manpower. But I need it to be quick, and I want higher advertising intensity over my opponents.”
Based on his requirements as well as the characteristics of this industry, I decided to start with Baidu bidding ads (which had immediate effects to meet Wu’s needs). But there was already a fiercely competitive online market in his industry, resulting in high bids on advertising, which requires a certain amount of online marketing investment in order to take a place. Mr. Wu pondered slightly and said, “If as you said, the bids on Baidu bidding ads will be ever higher and we are a little behind, it is better to do it now since the cost will be higher next year, anyway. As for the money for the online marketing, don’t you worry about it. Just go all out for it. But have someone keep an eye on it, because I don’t wanna spend money in vain.” I was very grateful to him for being generous but also felt a great responsibility. So I was very cautious of every decision I made because experience told me that it would be tricky to do online marketing for his business.
At that time, the only human resources we could use was a computer engineer and a salesman. There weren’t so many things to do at the start of the company, so they could give their full attention to the online business, which is a good thing for online marketing. First of all, I asked the computer engineer to contact Baidu to put in place the bidding background, and asked the salesman to collect information from websites of their counterparts’ and keep in record all the product information and keywords that might come in handy. The week after paying Baidu 5,600 yuan for pre-deposited ads, we were able to use the Baidu bidding background for management. To reconfirm the accuracy of the selected keywords, we didn’t rush to improve the paid rankings as usual, but made broad match for several important keywords (short words) such as “PC sheet”, “solid sheet”, “hollow sheet” to expand the search area so that all relevant people would like to click on the ads. The purpose of doing so was to figure out what search terms people preferred to use. However, without enough budget for online marketing through Baidu bidding, it is not suggested to do so. Few enterprises dared to do that because it cost too much, especially when the keywords in the industry are bid fiercely on Baidu bidding ads. Within a few days, we had driven up tens of thousands of yuan, but thanks to that, we obtained very valuable accurate keywords for the convenience of the online marketing work later, some of which were not quite the same as we thought before. These keywords could not only be applied to Baidu bidding ads, but were also of instructional significance for the mass postings and natural rankings in online marketing.
Next, we needed to determine the matching method for Baidu bidding keywords. We adopted phrase match for most keywords that are used in their Baidu bidding ads (as shown below) to attract more customers, and applied negative match for useless keywords to block non-customers as much as possible. Choosing the right match type is important in online marketing through Baidu bidding ads. Jiucheng was mainly engaged in PC solid sheets and didn’t sell PVC solid sheets. So we used negative match for the latter keyword. It is of great importance to add the right Baidu bidding keywords and eliminate the wrong Baidu bidding keywords in time for the online marketing through Baidu bidding ads. As for uncommon keywords like, “skylight dome”, we use broad match because it cost little,, and such rarely used words were mostly used by customers. The malicious clickers preferred popular words as they consumed more of their opponents’ cost on advertising.
Figure 6-3 Different words and prices determine different matching methods
In deciding on the areas to launch ads, we also steered clear of areas with intense competition (e.g., Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong) and remote areas (e.g., Tibei and Hainan), but focused on areas with fewer competitors and high market demand (e.g., Shaanxi and Shandong). As shown below:
Figure 6-4 Advertisements need to be placed in areas with fewer competitors
In deciding on the advertising time, we set the span from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. after taking into full account the working time and overtime in easternmost and westernmost China. We also ran Baidu bidding ads on Saturdays, as many of Jiucheng’s customers worked on that day. Besides, purchasers had more spare time on Saturday, so there would be a greater chance to be chosen as their supplier. See the figure below:
Figure 6-5 Ads were run during the working hours of most factories. The gray numbers represent the clock hours every day.
To prevent unexpected malicious clicks, we set a maximum daily advertising rate of 1,800 yuan. In addition, we also observe the data at any time through online software. Visitors who clicked on our ads very often but never called us for consultation would be considered malicious clickers. In that case, we would use Baidu’s IP exclusion tool (Baidu background allows up to 20 IP addresses to be blocked) to block the IP addresses of these visitors so as to reduce malicious clicks. As shown below:
Figure 6-6 Stop paying for malicious clicks by setting IP addresses of malicious clickers
(Note: the sign * in the last digit is to block the entire IP segment and precise independent IP).
Besides, we installed click fraud protection software. If the same IP clicked on the same ad 2 times within an hour, the clicker’s computer would crash and would be prohibited to access our website. The figure below showed the functions of the software:
Figure 6-7 Install third-party click fraud protection software to block opponents’ access.
As shown below, the software could also reflect where the customer came from, how many times they visited, how long they spent on a certain page, whether they accepted the invitation to communicate with the online customer service, what keywords they used to find the website.
Figure 6-8 Install third-party access statistical software to check sources of every visitor and keywords they used
To have a better understanding of customers, we installed access statistical software for the website and prepared a computer only for viewing the website access data at any time, and had them recorded and analyzed to find out different characteristics between customers and non-customers. In particular, when a customer called us, we would judge the size and sincerity of the customer by analyzing the access data on the website, which recorded what keywords the customer liked, which page he had seen, and how long he had spent on that page, and then informed the salesman in charge promptly. For instance, if a customer looked at product page first, then company profile and qualifications, especially ISO quality system certification and material SGS certification, he was most likely to be a real big customer. In that case, we needed to tell the salesmen to recommend high-quality products or even imported PC sheets.
To facilitate communication with customers, we installed online consultation windows on each page so that customers could direct consult with salesmen on any page without using chat tools. Some salesmen would also contact us through this window, which was kind of annoying. But at least we could reject them directly so that we could keep our business hotline open for clients.
While working on Baidu bidding ads, we didn’t stop studying the Baidu bidding ads run by our counterparts before or behind ours, and we tried our best to distinguish our tagline details from others to outsmart our opponents. After the setup of the 400 phone number, we added it into our advertisement. When customers were not sure which company they should consult, they might choose our website because of the toll-free 400 phone number. In addition, we made records and recordings of the phone calls from Baidu bidding ads for the everyday 400 business calls so that we could retrieve customers’ requirements in the future and use it to assess the work ability of the salesmen. As shown below:
Figure 6-9 Background Statistics of 400 Business Calls (Note: part of the phone numbers is covered due to customer privacy)
After the series of meticulous arrangements were done, Jiucheng received 10 business calls on the first day of bidding for Baidu bidding ads. One week later, Mr. Wu had to recruit more online marketing personnel and salesmen to deal with a large number of inquiries and quotes.
I first trained these newcomers with the necessary knowledge of online marketing. Then I picked out those who were interested in it and assigned one of them in charge of mass postings and the other in charge of collecting information about potential customers to carry out online direct marketing (QQ, email, SMS, phone, and fax). The one responsible for mass postings was supposed to pick out long words and unfamiliar words and use them as the company’s screen names (e.g., Shanghai PC solid sheet manufacturer, and Shanghai anti-static PC sheet manufacturer) and product names (e.g., greenhouse hollow sheet and flame retardant PC sheet) based on the keywords we had collected for the bidding before, and register on B2B platforms as a free member to publish free information. Meanwhile, he must check the Q&A columns every day and answer the questions in a timely manner. Sometimes he also needed to answer the question raised by himself, like “Which company in Shanghai sells PC solid sheets”.
On the other hand, the online marketing direct personnel was supposed to collect customer information on the Internet based on industry characteristics and keywords. The main application areas of PC sheets were relatively clear. They were mostly involved in the panel processing industry (like thick blister factories), advertising light boxes (outdoor advertising companies), large sun rooms and greenhouses (large industrial companies), so it was easy to sort out thousands of pieces of customer information in a short period of time. Then the marketer would reach these customers for direct promotion with the joint effort of QQ, email, SMS, phone, and fax. But we were careful about the frequency of our direct marketing ads. Each customer would receive at most one ad from Jiucheng in a week. To attract more customers, the salesmen made a weekly latest quotation table for PC sheets and had it sent along with the ad to win customers’ favor.
After all the above was done (Baidu bidding, mass postings and direct sales), what remained was to continue to improve and deepen the work, and determine the number of additional staff according to each group’s workload and growth rate.
From the first day of starting Baidu bidding ads, we were also optimizing the website and improving the natural listings. Our goal in the first phase was that when customers searched for suppliers in Shanghai, our website could rank on Baidu’s first SERP (to make up for the lack of our ads released in Shanghai). Three months later, it was achieved. Next, we built two sub-pages on the corporate website for different regions—Beijing and Guangdong, and had them promoted and optimized as well. After another three months, when customers in Beijing and Guangdong searched for suppliers, they could also find Jiucheng’s website on Baidu’s first SERP.
At the same time, Jiucheng had made necessary investments in a few major B2B websites, including a comprehensive portal (2,800 yuan as Alibaba annual fee and 1,500 yuan as the advertising fee of Wangxiaobao—a promotional product provided by Taobao) and an industry portal (1,200 yuan for annual gold membership of China Building Materials Website). Although the two portals didn’t play a big role, it was considered worthwhile in terms of raising the company’s profile and showing people of the same trade that there was another online competitor online coming. It was worth mentioning that some soft news published on the China Building Materials Website were often collected by Baidu and ranked high in industry news. While carrying out Alibaba promotion, we also used Wangxiaobao provided by Alibaba (similar to Baidu bidding ads) and ran ads in certain periods of time and in certain areas to control the costs. The charts below shows our setting of time and areas for Wangxiaobao ads:
Chart 6-10 The advertising time in Alibaba is basically the same as in Baidu
Chart 6-11 The advertising areas in Alibaba are basically the same as in Baidu
By then end of 2010, Jiucheng had reached sales of nearly 20 million yuan, and the company had expanded its staff to 30 people. It was not common to achieve such a high growth rate in such a short period of time by means of online marketing. The success was largely owed to their willingness to invest financial and human resources (there was ten staff in the online marketing department, and the 20 salesmen of the sales department were also able to publish free information by themselves and carry out online direct marketing work; besides, the investment in direct online marketing had reached 600,000 yuan every year). They had played Baidu bidding ads to the limit. Coupled with other online marketing means, they succeeded in achieving such brilliant results in a short period. After only one year, the sales had ranked top five in the industry. It is expected that by the end of 2011, the sales will have reached 30 million yuan.
On the other hand, Jiucheng had indeed realized the weakness of ad bidding—the cost became higher and higher and the malicious clicks were ever more frequent. In the early rapid development stage, they had to try every means to attract more customers, so 80% of the ad investment was used in the bidding. But in the later stable development stage, they need to rely on other means and try to reduce the investment in ad bidding to 50% next year, and 30% the third year. To reach the goal, the company registered two more websites for natural listings, and increased the number of staff in charge of mass postings from 1 to 3.