Baidu PPC recently upgraded its Geo-Targeting settings to prefecture-level, which means advertisers could target specific cities of a province for campaigns and ad groups.
The picture above shows how to set up prefecture-level geo-targeting. First, when you login to your Baidu PPC account, click Search Network, then you will be led to a Search Network new page, click the last tab on the top to enter Search Network Management Interface. Below your account name, you could find your account level settings. Click the second link to change geo-targeting settings. Choose the second option on the pop-up box, which means you could select a certain region for geo-targeting. Then you will see a list of provinces in China. For example, if you hover your mouse over Shanxi province, you could see a list of prefecture-level cities, then you could tick the check-box to choose the specific cities you want to target. It’s by default target all cities in the province.
Prefecture-level geo-targeting could help advertisers get higher quality visitors and decrease the low-conversion visitors with higher conversion rate; it could also reduce impression cost, therefore reduce conversion cost.
Baidu also gives suggestions for different types of advertisers to use prefecture-level geo-targeting more effectively.
First, for advertisers with business covering one city or several cities, using prefecture-level geo-targeting means the drop of impression and click times and the number of visitors. Conversion rate will not improve, either. Simply using prefecture-level geo-targeting without optimization could not achieve the best effect.
The chart shows that after using prefecture-level geo-targeting, impression drops from 200,000 per day to 50,000 per day. The conversion rate of impression to inquiry (before) equals to 1000/200,000=0.005, and the conversion rate (after) equals to 400/50,000=0.014. Conversion cost of inquiry (before) equals to 1000/15,000 yuan=0.067 times/yuan, and the conversion cost (after) equals to 400/8,000 yuan=0.05 times/yuan.
The conversion rate increases and conversion cost drops, but the actual number of conversions does not increase. How to improve conversions without increasing budget? The answer is to increase traffic volume. You could optimize following the suggestions on the chart below.
Second, for advertisers with business covering a province, several provinces or the whole nation, you could combine city advertising performance analysis with prefecture-level geo-targeting to achieve precise marketing.
The previous geo-targeting is to use the same budget, bid, keyword and ad copy for all provinces. However, different cities’ businesses vary, traffic value differs and bid competition is not the same. Prefecture-level geo-targeting will do better in precision marketing. For example, Nanjing has a new promotion campaign which requires new ad copies and specific landing page; Suzhou’s bid competition is higher than national average, so you need to increase bid price; Wuxi has higher conversion rate, you should allocate more budget in Wuxi, add more keywords to improve impression.
You could optimize following the steps on the chart below.
