Exploit Chinese Marketing Channels — Online Advertising (Part 4 Of 4)

Online advertising is an indispensable marketing channel for many Chinese retailers and brands. It becomes increasingly popular especially in eCommerce businesses. Compared with traditional advertising, online advertising has higher price-performance ratio, wider spreading range, dynamic media-rich interactive presentation and highly accurate targeting. There are CPC (Cost Per Click), CPM (Cost Per Mille), CPA (Cost Per Action) pricing models to run online advertising in China. To make the most of your advertising budget, you’d better learn from the local experts and make a viable strategy.

Target the right audience

Before launching your online advertising campaign, analyze the demographics of your target audience. Collect background information about your potential customers, such as age, gender, income, profession, etc. Find out their behavior pattern and which websites they like to visit the most. Once you know these information, you can analyze whether their motives of online activity correspond with your advertising intention. For example, if you conclude that your target audience is those well-educated 25-35 years old middle class women who actively engage in overseas online shopping, you may distribute your ads on fashion websites or SNS platforms.

Choose the right page spaces

After you settle on which sites to launch your ads, you need to be careful to choose the advertising spaces. There are 4 factors that should come into your decision making:

1. Traffic of the page you choose. Use Alexa to check the weight and traffic of each specific pages.
2. Relevance of contents. Be sure to choose those highly relevant pages that correspond with the contents of your ads.
3. Appraise the click rate. Generally, the most clicked spaces are those at the left top.
4. Comments of users. Analyze the comments of the chosen page. Make sure that the pages you choose are popular.

Use your budget wisely

Some experts advise that 80% of your advertising budget should be used on online ads that can directly bring orders, rather than being used to run ads that can only promote brand awareness. For eCommerce, orders matter more than brand awareness does. The input-output ratio of your online ads must be higher that 1:3. That is to say, for example, 8 million Dollars of advertising investment should bring about at least 24 million Dollars of sales.

Brand awareness helps

Even though you need to assign more budget to order-generating ads, you still need to invest in promoting your brand awareness. The remaining 20% of your advertising budget will serve as such purpose. A rising brand awareness will help to increase the conversion rate of your online ads. It’s believed among China’s eCommerce opinion leaders that 1% increase of brand awareness will result in 2% increase of the ROI of eCommerce sites. But how is it possible to quantify the result of brand promotion ads? One may ask. The most convenient way in China is to look upon Baidu Index of your business. It’s the most reliable indicator of your brand advertising effect.

Shorten the route to purchase

To gain more orders from your online advertising, you need to reduce the actions users have to take to come to your site and place orders. Any redundant actions will drive users away. The longer the operation journey takes, the more users you will lose. Streamline your registration and buying process, save time for your users, then you will retain more users and maximize your advertising effect.