China search market nears 2 billion RMB

SEARCH   BAIDU   GOOGLE  GROUPM

Beijing - China's search engine market has reached an estimated 1.81 billion RMB, a 47% jump on the previous year, according to Analysys International.

The results are taken from a report China Search Engine Market Quarterly Tracker Q2 2009.

The research firm said China's search engine market has seen a large increase due to several reasons.

The financial crisis has led to a shrinking marketing budget that forces decision makers to consider more cost-effective marketing solutions and medium and small enterprises have come to recognise search as an effective marketing medium.

Analysys advised that search operators pay attention to companies that shifted their products from exporting to domestic markets and the challenge that companies face between search engine and e-commerce platforms when doing internet marketing.

The firm said search engine operators need to describe its marketing value more clearly to these companies. 

For big companies, search marketing has become an important component of their integrated marketing plans and search is particularly critical when companies launch an e-commerce business.  

For example, Lancome has built an online shopping centre and apart from its online ads, search has become an important aspect in its official website as well as brand reputation. 

The report also showed that the top 3 dominant search players in China are Baidu (61%), Google (29.1%) and Yahoo (5.6%). 

Robbie Hills (pictured), CEO Asia Pacific for GroupM Search, observed that Baidu will still maintain its clear market share gap over Google for the next few years, which applies in users, search queries and revenue.

He said for Google to close the gap, they will need to sign large traffic partnerships with website owners or spend big on consumer marketing campaigns but are unlikely to do the latter.

"The main reason Baidu continues to maintain the share gap is that there is the Chinese Netizen's natural desire to use the home player, this is a behavior that is very hard to change," Hills added.

He observed across their agencies they are seeing increasing amount of clients looking to utilise search engine marketing in China that includes paid Search, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and mobile search.

Hills said they are also seeing large multi -nationals such as Dell, P&G, HP, Texas Instruments, Nike increasingly expanding their search programs and budgets.

This is a direct result of a lift in understanding and importantly the ROI has been clearly demonstrated to them.

"This year we will see the large packaged good clients investing in search in a large way for the first time across Paid search and SEO, "he said.

The importance of SEO amongst clients at all levels across China has been one of the major changes in the last six months.

He added that with Baidu's dominance of the search market, combined with its recent efforts to make search results more clearly defined between paid and natural, a strong SEO strategy is mandatory in China now.   ___________________________________________________________________________________

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