Ecommerce and Search Engine Marketing in China

ECOMMERCE AND SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING IN CHINA SEARCHLABORATORY Global Search Engine Marketing Language The Chinese online shopper What Baidu likes Little gender bias. Online shoppers breakdown to 52% male, 48% female Sites that offer good user experience • Mandarin is the main spoken language in mainland China High quality site content, this is more • Simplified Chinese is the written language used across the country important than external links • There are eight main dialects in China, but the written language is the same everywhere (in mainland China) which is simplified Chinese Original content • Predominately young: 60% are below the age of 30 • People in the high income bracket (above 5,000 Yuan per month) are more likely to shop online • Online shopping is more popular in coastal regions and spending higher in tier one cities (Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing and Shenzhen) • Reviews play a big part in the online shopping process Sites that offer the user genuine, useful information High click-through rates motivated by price. Online shopping offers What Baidu dislikes Mainland China HongKong Taiwan a better chance to compare prices • Purchases from overseas online retailers have doubled annually in the last three years Macao Mandarin Cantonese Mandarin Cantonese, Hakka dialects, Mandarin Spoken language Traditional Traditional Chinese Payment Written Simplified Chinese Traditional Chinese language Chinese Internet penetration 591 464 million • The Chinese online third-party payment market is led by Alipay and Tenpay, which both account for 67.8% of all electronic payments in China • Cash on delivery • Any link purchasing behaviour or link trading • Small websites with more than 40 outbound links. These sites will be degraded by Baidu internet users as of August 2013 Il a popular method of payment Artificial ranking exercises. If a site which has poor quality content but ranks high for keywords Baidu will manually interfere with the ranking, either resulting in a demotion or exclusion from the SERP million Search Engines • Inbound links from blogs, forums and forum signatures. These types of links have been devalued • Black Hat behaviour. Baidu has updated its algorithm to identify sites that indulge in spammy behaviour • Floating adverts that are detrimental to the user experience Chinese citizens access the internet via smartphones and wireless devices Qihoo 360: 18.23% Baidu: 63.16% Ecommerce market BaidE of the Chinese population made at Sogou: 10.35% 49% Rankings matter least one online purchase in 2013. 60-65% The global average is 40% Soso: 3.62% • This is set to rise to 71% in 2017 • 11/11 is Singles Day in China, the world's biggest ecommerce day in online shopping. The Chinese retailer Alibaba alone took in $5.7 billion in sales on this day in 2013 • Baidu's market share has declined from 79.6% in 2012 • Oihoo started out life as a software company of users click on websites which are listed in specialising in antivirus products before offering a search service in 2012 the top ten positions in the results • China's ecommerce market has grown at 71% • Google has just 2.88% market share, down from 15.7% in 2012 annually since 2009 • 20%-25% of users click on websites which are listed in 11th-20th place in the search results • 3%-4% of users click on websites listed in position 21-30 • China's ecommerce market was worth $190 billion in 2012. It is set to be worth $541 billion in 2015 • Google no longer hosts its search engine within China and has instead rerouted its .cn domain to Hong Kong, where it collectively dominates 57% of the market • China has surpassed the US as the world's biggest ecommerce market Search Laboratory London // Leeds // New York For more information on trading online in China contact us: Sources: Bain and Co, Emarketer, iResearch, Li&Fung, CNNIC, CNZZ, Baidu Baike T: +44 113 212 1211 or +44 207 147 9980 E: [email protected] Twitter: @searchlabs W: www.searchlaboratory.com