What’s better about Google Analytics than Baidu Tongji

• Google Analytics offers very powerful cross data analysis functions. Almost every dimension available can be used for cross data analysis upon another dimension. In Baidu Tongji, there are not a big number of comparable dimensions (only Localization and Source are present in most of the reports).
• Advanced segmentation functions are provided in Google Analytics, allowing the user to easily create detailed and customized segmentation of the data he wishes to see. This is extremely useful for website with multiple languages, or has specific visitor segmentations.
• Google Analytics offers many ways of creating a customized report, using nearly every dimension available in the system. The user can choose among dimensions such as Source, Localization, Ads Series, Medium, to create customized reports, only base on information that interests him the most.
• The localization defined by Google Analytics is much larger than Baidu Tongji. In Google Analytics, we have localization information for almost every country in the world, allowing user to segment by countries. But in Baidu Tongji, the localization has only China (can be detailed in provinces) and foreign areas. There is no segmenting to other countries.
• Deploying Google Analytics is more reliable. Lots of website building systems provide Google Analytics installation functionality. We can install Google Analytics to the whole website by only adding the account information to the system. Baidu Tongji provides an auto-installation service, but it changes every file on the website through FTP, which may cause stability problem for the website.

Compared with Google Analytics, in what Baidu Tongji excels?

• Created by Chinese, Baidu Tongji provides a very detailed segmentation on the Chinese localizations: you can choose to segment your visits by province, to analyze the visits coming from different regions within China.
• Baidu Tongji offers databases useful to Chinese website administrators, such as an IP base for Chinese cities, the statistics based on the most used browsers or ISPs in China.
• To support the complex and powerful analytics functionalities, Google Analytics has a longer time delay on the received data (we cannot see data within the past 1 or 2 hours). But Baidu Tongji provides data with a shorter time delay, allowing the user to monitor almost in real time events occurring on the website.

Baidu Tongji offers micro view of website visitors’ activities: for example, we can see the last 500 visit records of the latest visitors, or the detailed visit track of a certain user. Google Analytics tends to provide a macro view, without any information on the micro statistics.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that Chinese Internet users are online for an average of 2.7 hours per day, considerably more than other developing countries and more on par with usage patterns in Japan and the United States. Numerous factors help drive Chinese, more than other populations, to engage in social media. These include rural-to-urban migration that has separated families, the loneliness of the one-child generation, and a distrust of information from government-controlled media.

Chinese netizens actively engage in discussions that could directly affect companies. A recent study by OgilvyOne in China found that 55 percent of China’s netizens had initiated or participated in online discussions about companies. Understanding social media is no longer a luxury for companies, operating in China—it is an imperative. Domestic social media platforms differ in various ways from Western platforms. Companies should learn how Chinese consumers use social media and take advantage of the platforms to conduct consumer research, launch products, manage public relations crises, and more.

What should companies do about social media in China?

At first, understand local netizens. Monitor the channels they’re using. What are their motivations for using social media? How to they interact with each other across these channels? What drives them to participate and spread messages and etc.? Based on these informations, we can start our social media marketing.

Secondly, be visible on the right channels. We cannot simply jump on the social media bandwagon. Which one is the best for us? Blog? Forum? Or Social networking? We must choose them based on ourselves. We must understand the netizens’ kinds and their interest in the channel. Then, we can broadcast our brand to them and also we will get their spread.

Thirdly, update the content timely. Support some useful and compelling contents to the netizens. And then, we can keep our current audiences and get more and more audiences.

Lastly, gain and maintain trust. Spread our contents to the people who need those messages. Try to add legitimate value to netizens’ online experiences. . Most importantly, don’t try to deceive netizens – it will only lead to backlash and reputational damage.
China’s social media landscape is constantly growing, innovating, evolving. Companies must study how to use it.

2. The different target audiences. Baidu’s main target audience is China, whereas Google’s target audience is the whole world. This is very obvious on Baidu advertising and Google Adwords. For Baidu advertising, we can choose the China provinces as the promotion area for every campaign, but we cannot choose any specific foreign country. But on Google Adwords, we can choose any countries as our promotion area. This well reflects that the focus of Baidu is Chinese market, while Google focuses on the entire world.

3. Language difference. Most of the information or content on Baidu is in Chinese. Google aims to provide service to the entire world and provides translation of its services into other languages for those who cannot read English.

4. Different advertising costs. Compared with Google’s keyword per click costs, Baidu’s one is lower. In the Baidu advertising dashboard, we can choose daily, weekly or monthly budget. But for Google, we just can choose daily budget.

5. Different extensional services. Baidu supports many extensional services for adapting to Chinese users’ habits, such as Baidu Baike, Baidu tieba, Baidu Zhidao and so on. All of these services are Baidu’s special products. Google’s extensional services usually work for the customers in the whole world, not only for Chinese people.

6. Different SEO. Google and Baidu SEO are very different for either keyword ranking algorithm, or website content or external links. Even if your Baidu SEO is pretty good, that does not mean that the Google SEO is also good.

To summarize, if the company’s target audience is Chinese people, Baidu is necessary; if the target audience is foreigners, Google is better. However for most of the companies in China, a mix of both is the best choice.

Do not install the sample database when you install Joomla, because these examples usually are not related to the theme of your website. If you have installed it, we suggest you to delete it and empty the recycle bin; otherwise it will contain duplicated data that is largely used by other sites, and this is not conductive to SEO.

• 2. Your site name should be your domain

Some people like to fill in the Site Name with many keywords. In fact, this would not help you much. When users register on your site, they will receive an email saying” welcome to software   download database web source” which seems not very clear and also it is not your wish.

• 3 Disable PDF links

The rank value of PDF files is usually higher than that of the average webpage. Because Google considers that the PDF files are filtered, collated and the content value is higher than ordinary webpage. However there is no menu in the PDF links page generated by Joomla. When users access to this page through search engine, they are unable to visit others pages of the website. Therefore you should disable this feature.

• 4. Do not put too many social bookmarking links on the page

Users like the clean pages and so does search engine. Therefore we suggest you to put social bookmarking links in the valuable content pages, rather than leave around everywhere.

• 5. Redirect www and non www domain name to the same page

It is very simple. Add the following code to .htaccess file and pay attention to replace MyDomain.com with your own domain name

## Can be commented out if causes errors.
Options FollowSymLinks
# mod_rewrite in use

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^MyDomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^.*MyDomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.MyDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

• 6. Open the website cache

Search engines like to visit the fast speed website, open this option, and make your site the better performance.

• 7.Fill in the complete description for each section and category.

It can help to improve the site’s page rank and optimize search engine visit.

• 8. Simple is beautiful

Thousands of pages indexed by Google is not a good thing, especially some of  the pages have little value content .Google usually does not like it. Some of Joomla’s components will generate a lot of pages and some of them are useless for the website. You should enter site:mydomain.com in Google for checking. If the indexed pages contain no significant value, you can remove them from Joomla.

• 9. Fill in metadata in Joomla’s Global Settings page

Complete the installation of Joomla, the default metadata is “Joomla! – The dynamic portal engine and content management system”. If you do not want it as the description of your site, change it.

• 10.Confidence

Joomla designer takes into account the SEO problems. It is a great CMS and you should learn how Joomla works. You’ll find your site have a higher search rankings soon.

Choose a good eCommerce (e-commerce) platform
Nowadays, we can find many types of online service development for your eCommerce platform. However, not all the methods can solve your problem. To ensure that your online business does the best exhibition of your products, the Magento platform is one of the most professional and most efficient solutions. Many successful entrepreneurs begin to use Magento platform to develop their online business, because Magento really brings them the advantages which cannot be ignored.
You can check the advantages of Magento in our blog of July 15th, 2010:

http://blogen.bysoftchina.com/technologies/magento/web-application-development-magento-ecommerce/161

Edit simply your website’s content to make it understandable
We may encounter such a situation: we chose to go to the one website and decided to buy something, but due to the website’s content structure, it was difficult to find out the payment procedure, so we gave it up. This loss of conversion is really regrettable. Therefore, make your website be attractive and simple. This is one of the most common drawbacks of Chinese websites. So, if your website in China did this point well, it will be fresh air.

Update in time your website
The update process is required to increase the dynamic of your website. This work can not only allow your customers to see your latest news, but also give you more chance for your search engines ranking.

Do not display excessive information
Sometimes we see some online shopping platform displaying some very attractive advertising, especially about prices, such as “From 10 rmb”. Then, the customers come in and discover later that only a few products are at that price. So they leave without purchasing. In China, the consumers like to buy things in promotion; they may be attracted by your promotion slogan. So if you give them wrong information, it will require a duplication of efforts without any results.

Have a good knowledge about the different characteristics of search engines
In China, both foreign and local search engines are used, such as Google and Baidu. Google has never given you a good ranking even if you have paid for, so check with Baidu since it’s not the same situation. So you should know more about this domain to ensure that your web advertising is enough efficient.

But what you may not know yet are these ten tips that can increase the effectiveness of your CPC campaign, while also helping to keep your search engine marketing budget on track. These tips focus on Google AdWords, but many apply to CPC programs across the board.

Show when it counts. Adjust your campaign to consider user peak times. If your target audience is primarily searching for your products between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on weekdays then only show your ads during these times. Within its “Edit Campaign Settings” Google has a handy option called Ad Scheduling which allows you to automatically turn your campaigns on and off at specific times. What’s more, if there is a peak time of day when your customers tend to search then you can even up the budget at that time and lower it at others.

Choose keywords carefully. Various tools will help find specific keywords or phrases that are being used by your audience. You can pay to use tools such as Keyword Discovery, but a free and easy way to find out is to use Google’s Keyword Tool (accessible when you’re logged in to AdWords). To use it, you type in your term and the tool instantly gives you variations people have searched for, a rough idea of the number of searches, the advertising competition against those terms and, if you add a max CPC, an estimate of the position and cost for each term.

Select longer tail terms. Another useful aspect of the Google keyword tool is that it can help you find Longer Tail terms. Longer Tail terms are ones that appeal to users searching for very niche or specific items. For example, a generic term from the B2B world would be ‘valve’. A Long Tail term would be ‘pneumatic pilot valve’. If your budget is limited, it is worth avoiding the high cost generic terms and trying to pick up traffic from people doing very specific searches. Not only will the CPC be significantly cheaper, but you’ll tend to find that prospects know exactly what they want, and the quality and number of inquiries resulting from the clicks will be much higher.

Go negative to be positive. Staying with Keywords—think negative! A lot of keywords are included in B2B, B2C and general social searches. Appearing in the results for anything other than your target market is a waste of time and potentially a waste of money. Adding negative keywords is an ideal way to exclude your campaigns from areas that are not relevant to you and enquiries you cannot fulfill. For example, if your company sells power tools, but you don’t rent them, then words like “rent,” “hire,” or “lease” would be your negative keywords.

Think seasonal. Some products are going to be more or less popular depending on certain times of the year due to holidays, weather, or major events. If your business sells seasonable products it may be worth upping your spend in the months leading up to these high-demand times to reap the extra traffic…and profits. To the same effect, if seasonal keywords are not part of your core business, focus your energy elsewhere until the excitement (and bid price) decreases.

Ad copy is key. You’ve spent ages picking quality keywords and setting up your campaigns and hopefully now your CPC ad appears high on the Search Engines…you’re there in front of your potential customers so don’t fall at the last hurdle. Ad copy is one of the single most important components in differentiating you from your competitor. To help improve your copy, try Google’s Dynamic Keyword Insertion Tool. Automatically adding the keyword someone searched for into the ad copy is an easy way to ensure relevancy in the eyes of both Google and users, but is no longer the most effective. This is a trick that many people already know and it is therefore overused. Try to use distinctive, even quirky, verbiage to catch your prospect’s eye. Include a major call to action; if you have a unique selling proposition or new offer say so.

Back it up. Don’t think of your other promotions, be they offline or online, as separate entities. People may see your print ad, for example, and remember the creative and the product you’re selling but not your company name. If they typed your latest marketing slogan into a search engine, would a recognizable CPC ad appear for your company taking them to your site for more information? If not then you could be missing out. Likewise, the only thing they may remember from your print ad or trade show booth is your company name, so make sure your ads are appearing when someone is searching for you by name (and don’t just bank on your company appearing on the first page of organic results).

Go vertical. Google AdWords allows you to display your ads across their content and partner networks. However, the content network is not always great for the B2B market as it relies on Google understanding the contextual content of pages and then only bringing your ad back on the pages that are relevant. To make ads more effective you can specify the sites you wish your adverts to appear on by creating a placement targeted campaign.

Another option for reaching a more focused, relevant audience is vertical search engine advertising. Because of their more segmented nature, vertical search engines reach a very targeted audience, and often produce far better quality traffic at the same or smaller spend levels than you’ll find with their general search engine counterparts.

Go local versus international. Is your business local or international? If it’s international then you may need to set up campaigns on a country by country basis, and tailor your keywords and ads to the various languages, time-zones, product variations, specific landing pages, etc. Also, determine your business’s capabilities. If you can only deliver locally then there is no point displaying your ads to the whole US. Google allows you to target your ads (based on users’ IP addresses) to a named state or town, a radius around a specific location, or even a specified geographic area of your choice.

Use CPC management tools (Google AdWords). In addition to Google’s keyword tool, there are two others that are particularly helpful. The first is AdWords Editor. It’s a free tool that offers you great control over multiple and/or large campaigns. The benefits include uploading bulk campaigns and keywords, making multiple changes to any part of the campaign, getting stats across all campaigns, etc. The second tool is Google’s Search Query Performance Reports. These reports show you what people are searching for to trigger your ads, which you can then use to adapt both your CPC words and the content on your site for SEO.

Hopefully you’ve discovered a few new ideas from our list of top tips for effective CPC advertising. Adding these to your repertoire of online marketing tools can help improve your current (and future) online advertising campaigns without expending a vast amount of resources.

Focus on Your Key Message

Don’t use lengthy product descriptions in general lists of products, like categories or search results. Visitors will simply scan over long sections of text and can miss your value proposition. Better to focus on your key message for product lists.

Give Localized Delivery Information

Put Your Phone Number in the Title Tag

If you make sales by phone, include your phone number in the main title tag of your home page. This way, someone can call you without visiting your home page, because the phone number will also appear, in bold-face, in Google search results. Featuring your phone number prominently is also a signal of honesty and transparency.

Aim for Quality Backlinks

Good, Better, Best

Consumers love to be told what to do. In a day when information overload is the norm, keeping things simple and direct is important. Telling a customer what is a good choice, a better choice, and finally the best choice, is a very good way to increase conversion rate and help your customers find what they want quickly.

Make Your Web Pages Load Faster

Warn Consumers of Scams

Search and monitor social media networks and other Web 2.0 platforms for new scams on a regular basis. If you find your company is being victimized by a scam, warn consumers through various mediums, including the company page on your social networks, your corporate website, and the official company fan site.

Have a Great Newsletter

Make User Guide Available

Shoppers like to be able to view or print product user guide or manual, particularly when looking at consumer electronics products. User guide not only helps shoppers select the right product, but can also prevent returns. These documents are commonly available as PDF files included in the product content made available by your vendors via hosted content links.

Within several weeks, minimum bids for a number of Sponsored Search keywords will no longer be fixed at $.10. Your new minimum bids can be lower or higher than $.10. Content Match minimum bids currently will remain at $.10.

The amount set as your minimum bid on a keyword in Sponsored Search can vary depending on multiple factors, such as the relevance of your keywords (as measured by the quality of the ads associated with them), and the number of bidders and bid amounts in the particular keyword market.

With this new formula, instead of considering your actual CPC, Google will consider your maximum CPC bid, which you control. This means that your ad’s eligibility to be promoted is no longer dependent on the bids of advertisers below you. Therefore, if you have a high quality ad, you now have more control to achieve a top position by increasing your maximum CPC.

Your actual CPC will continue to be determined by the auction, but subject to a minimum price for top spots. The minimum price is based on the quality of your ad and is the minimum amount required for your ad to achieve top placement above Google search results. As always, the higher your ad’s quality, the less you will pay. And you will never be charged more than your maximum CPC bid.