Ah good old Baidu, China's most used search engine.  The search engine with awkward ad rules and a primitive user interface for advertisers.  While claiming 2 searches out of every person in China each day, I wonder how many of these were search queries for MP3 files. 

Check out this Baidu ad on YouTube. Interesting play on what is perceived to be Baidu's advantage - a better understanding of the Chinese language compared to its foreign competitors. But a search engine with the first page of results dedicated entirely to "paid" search? With "fixed" ad slots you can purchase? (instead of bid for - as with the "foreigner" search engines) Don't blame me for not being convinced of their dedication to finding the best search results for users.

Then there come news that Baidu is looking to move into the Japan market with their expert knowledge in Asian languages.  It’s interesting… but let's hope there are as much Japanese MP3 files to grab as there are in China. 

We are both blessed and cursed in Asia when it comes to computer usage and information access. We are blessed because most of us in this generation are at least bilingual so we can assimilate information not only in English but also in our native languages. We are cursed because the characters of our languages are represented as double byte character set (DBCS) in the computer world. What this means is quite a lack of support by software vendors in the single byte characters set (SBCS) world at least until recent years.

This "issue" gets additionally complicated in search engine marketing. Because the search engines want all their advertisements to be uniformly formatted, they put restrictions on how many characters can go into the ad title and description. For English this is fairly uniformed and the restrictions are usually reasonable, but when it comes to Asian languages and Asian search engines there can be some real odd limitations.

For example, Overture Japan (owned by Yahoo) put a 15 character limitation on the ad titles and 33 character limitation on the description. This is fine and dandy if your ads are entirely written in Japanese but try putting a German brand name into the ads (the German language is known for the length of its characters) and all of a sudden those 15 characters becomes extremely limiting. The problem is, Overture Japan actually treat the single byte character as double byte so while you might think 15 double byte characters = 30 single bytes, in reality your 18 character German brand name will not fit into the title space!

Granted most search users of in Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, etc. search and browse in their native languages anyhow, but you can't deny the fact that English brand names (eg: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz) are typically more well recognized (and advertised). As an advertiser, I wouldn't want my potential customer to waste time in translating our ads if a well recognized name can draw their attention immediately.

As some of my friends know, I've begun working for a German based search engine marketing firm since last September.  I've gone from a complete SEM idiot with a "traditional" online marketing background and some SEO project management experiences, to a certified Google Adwords Professional who manages millions of dollar in online ad spending in 14 APAC countries in a matter of months. Thanks to the intensive training in Germany and supportive team and partners who are much willing to share their experiences I am really diving deep into this exciting field.