East-West-Connect.com

Chinese Domain Name Preferences Not What You Think

Tait — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 03:22:49 +0000

When entering the Chinese market, choice of domain name is often one of the first decisions that will need to be made. It’s a decision that shouldn’t be made lightly. Choose right, and you’ll have a more memorable, easily pronounceable, trustworthy domain name. Choose wrong and you may miss out on type-in traffic or end up with a domain that doesn’t inspire enough trust in the minds of your potential customers.

We recently held a survey to answer a few simple questions about domain name selection for the Chinese market. We received responses from 34 Chinese Internet users.

We asked three questions about 16 different domain pairs. The domain pairs were broken into four groups to test four different variables. The questions are translated as follows.

Of the following two domain names, which do you believe belongs to a more trustworthy website?
Of the following two domain names, which do you find easier to remember?
Of the following two domain names, which do you find easier to pronounce?

.com Strongly Preferred Over .cn

Not only did respondents feel that .com domains were more trustworthy, they also found them to be more memorable and pronounceable. It seems that .com is seen as the international standard in China.

	.com	.cn	No Difference
Trustworthy	64%	29%	8%
Memorable	67%	20%	10%
Pronounceable	68%	17%	12%

Domain variants tested:

ralano.com/ralano.cn
lawton.com/lawton.cn
fengshui.com/fengshui.cn
liuxue.com/liuxue.cn

For the foreign-sounding domain names, Ralano and Lawton, the results were even further skewed towards a preference to .com. For example, 89% of respondents thought ralano.com was more pronounceable and 75% felt it was more trustworthy.

Interestingly, even for the Chinese practice of fengshui, the .com was still preferred, although not by quite as much. 53% of respondents felt fengshui.com was more trustworthy, while 33% preferred fengshui.cn.

English Preferred Over Pinyin

Respondents generally preferred English domain names over pinyin domain names.

	Pinyin	English	No Difference
Trustworthy	22%	67%	8%
Memorable	32%	56%	9%
Pronounceable	28%	59%	17%

Domain variants tested:

ribenfangchan.com/japanrealestate.com
englishlessons.com/yingyupeixun.com
luoshanji.com/losangeles.com
pianyijipiao.com/cheapflights.com

Respondents were split over the Japanese real estate domain names. Although most felt the pinyin version was easier to remember, most also felt that the English version was more trustworthy.

Respondents very strongly preferred the English versions of the English lessons domain and Los Angeles domain, presumably because these are distinctly Western topics.

Hyphenation Preferred For Longer English-Language Domains

Respondents preferred the use of hyphens, when used in longer domains written in English.

	Hyphen	No Hyphen	No Difference
Trustworthy	43%	42%	10%
Memorable	44%	45%	6%
Pronounceable	35%	44%	17%

Domain variants tested:

uk-language-school.com/uklanguageschool.com
zhongguodaoyou.com/zhongguo-daoyou.com
cheap-brands.com/cheapbrands.com
vancouver-hotels.com/vancouverhotels.com

For both the Vancouver hotels and uk language school domains, respondents favoured hyphens. Being especially long, 64% of respondents felt uk-language-school.com was easier to remember than uklanguageschool.com, while only 28% felt the opposite.

Overall, the results were split on this topic. I would recommend using a hyphenated domain name only for English language domains that contain three or more English words, or English words that are longer or more complex.

Singular Preferred Over Plural

Respondents preferred the use of the singular form over plural.

	Singular	Plural	No Difference
Trustworthy	48%	37%	10%
Memorable	58%	32%	5%
Pronounceable	52%	34%	9%

Domain variants tested:

russiatour.com/russiatours.com
dogtoy.com/dogtoys.com
buyhouses.com/buyhouse.com
thailand.com/thailands.com

The table above shows the results for three of the domain pairs, not including thailand.com/thailands.com. This was a trick question to see if respondents would prefer an “s” at the end even if it didn’t make sense. They didn’t. Respondents found thailand.com more memorable, easier to pronounce and more trustworthy than thailands.com by 3 to 1.

Respondents were split down the middle for dogtoy.com vs. dogtoys.com.

In my experience watching Chinese people use the Internet, they very often forget the plurality of a domain name, so I always recommend getting both the plural and singular version.

Whether to make the singular or plural version the default domain is a tough choice as Chinese Internet users may not feel the same about plurality as you do.

Summary

Non-Chinese businesses should typically use a .com English-language domain. Although not tested in this survey, I always believe shorter domains are always better. If you use several English words, placing hyphens in between words will make it easier for Chinese Internet users to remember.

Singular words are generally preferred to plural, but it depends on the topic.

Same as with domains for English readers, it’s wise to buy common variants of your domain name. Buying the .cn, non-hyphenated and plural versions of the domain will help you avoid losing type-in traffic.

More?

If you have general questions about domain names, we’re glad to answer.

If you want a killer domain name for your business, we can help you create one as part of our Chinese brand name creation service.

In the future, I’d love to do a test where we actually test respondents’ ability to remember a domain name, rather than just ask them if they feel it’s memorable.

About the author

Tait Lawton is an online marketer focused on the Chinese market. He is the founder of Nanjing Marketing Group, a company that provides Chinese-language Internet marketing services to Western clients. Tait has a Bachelor of Commerce degree from University of Alberta.

You can follow him on Twitter or check out the other contact methods here.

Chinese Mobile Internet User Demographics 2012

Samantha — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 03:10:19 +0000

As a follow up for the recent post I made about the types of mobile phones used in China, I’ve prepared some data on Chinese mobile Internet user demographics. The data is from the latest CNNIC report published in January 2012.

The proportion of male users rose from 57.7% to 58.1% over the past year.

The largest user groups are still ages 10 to 19 and 20 to 29, but the proportion of users aged 30 to 49 has increased.

User income is increasing quickly.

The urban-rural gap has actually grown.

Instant messaging is the most used function. Microblog use has exploded over the past year.

If you are interested in other posts about Internet users and mobile usage in China, you might want to check out some of these recent posts:

About the author

Samantha Wang is the manager at Nanjing Marketing Group, where she coordinates a wide variety of Chinese localization and marketing projects for Western clients. Samantha has a Bachelor of Management degree from Nanjing University of Technology.

China Mobile Phone Market Snapshot – Dec 2011

Samantha — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 05:44:46 +0000

There were over 975 million mobile phone users as of November 2011 according to the MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China). Mobile phones have become an indispensable tool for modern communication.

2011 was the year of smartphone in China. iPhones, iPads, Andriod smartphones and tablets became hot search topics on search engines as well as popular topics in people’s daily life. Looking back on the year, it seems that after just one night, everyone in China started holding a big screen phone or tablet on the subway, at restaurants, even while waiting for red lights. You can see them almost everywhere.

I’ve prepared a little data for you on the types of mobile devices being used in China as of the end of 2011. The data is collected from ZOL and based on a metric they call “attention rate”, which is a metric used by ZOL to estimate sales and popularity. It is based on the click rates of Chinese Internet users that have used one or more of ZOL's 85 websites or 79 other media sites such as Sina, Sohu, QQ, 163 and Taobao.

Top 5 Mobile Brands by Attention Rate in 2011

Nokia and Samsung took the first and second place, with Samsung slipping up to number 1 in quarter 4. HTC and Motorola took third and fourth place. Sony Ericsson started at fifth place but was then displaced by Apple.

Bigger Screens Became More Popular

As more and more phones are now touch-screen, big screen phones have become more and more popular. 3.3 to 4 inches is the most common size, and rose in attention rate from 31.4% to 49.8% over the past year. Will mobile phones in China continue to grow in size?

Mobile Phone Price Trends in the Chinese Market

Although the overall average price of mobile phones didn’t change much, smartphone prices are clearly on an upward trend.

From all the charts above, we can see that 2011 was a milestone in Chinese mobile phone market history. The industry leader Nokia is facing a greater challenge than ever before. Phone prices, one of the most important factors that affects purchase decisions, continued to rise along with the functionality of smartphones.

About the author

Free Baidu Account Setup - 10 Days Only

Tait — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 02:10:08 +0000

From February 8th to February 17th, you can skip Baidu's 600-1,200 Yuan account setup fee and the document translation fee.

About the author

What Back Flips Taught Me About Internet Marketing in China

Tait — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:05:19 +0000

Last week I was interviewed by James Renouf for an upcoming audio book and one of the questions they asked me was something like, “What is the biggest mistake you see Western companies making in entering the online Chinese market?” The answer I gave was that they just sit and wait until the best time for entry is already over.

I think that’s a good answer for Western companies in general, and especially true for companies that are making something that can easily be copied, such as an application or web startup. However, I gave it some more thought over the weekend to see what other major mistakes I may be able to identify. My thoughts on this matter led me to memories of when I learned to do some basic diving.

A few years ago I went through a diving kick with a couple of my friends. Two or three evenings a week, we’d jump and dive off the platforms and diving boards at a local swimming pool. This was the same year I started Nanjing Marketing Group.

Now, I didn’t know how to dive, I wasn’t acrobatic in the least and I was scared of heights too. For me, glass-walled elevators are scary. Both the friends I went with, Nick and Ryan, are the opposite. Nick especially is acrobatic to the extreme and seems to enjoy jumping off of anything dangerously high – stair wells, mountains, airplanes and of course diving platforms.

The first thing I learned to do was simply jump off the platforms. If you’ve done this before, you know it’s not complicated. But if you haven’t done it before, it can be pretty scary to take the jump. We humans are hard-wired to keep a safe distance away from deadly heights, even if it is just water below. Anyways, I started off by just doing some straight jumps and that worked out fine.

A few trips to the pool later, the time came when Ryan and Nick thought I should be learning how to do back flips. I knew that technically shouldn’t be too difficult. With enough height, a back flip isn’t that difficult of a manoeuvre for a young person in decent shape, even if they are inexperienced. But jumping out from a concrete platform and trying to spin backwards still felt like a very hard thing to commit to. Ryan gave me some words of encouragement: “Come on man, even my girlfriend can back flip off of there.” Well, I wasn’t going to have that. Not that there’s anything wrong with his girlfriend, but the implication was that she wasn’t experienced with diving either.

You know, if you haven’t done a back flip before, jumping out from a concrete platform with the hope of doing a 360 and landing on your feet isn’t actually that easy. You want to see the ground and you naturally want to level yourself out, so the first 180 degrees of the turn goes against your natural instincts.

So, I hedged my bets a bit and jumped with my right side turned down a bit… just a bit. In mid-flip it made me feel safer, made me feel like I could get out of this crazy commitment if I wanted to, until… … SLAP, I hit the water on my side after doing a turn of about 270 degrees or so. The entire right side of my body was red.

How the heck does this relate to entering a foreign market you say?

There are things in life, and business, that can be done partially, and there are others that must be taken full turn. Doing them partially only results in pain.

I often feel that the many Western business people that approach me about marketing in China must feel a bit like I did before doing a back flip. Doing business so far away, in a country with a greatly different language and culture must feel far outside one’s comfort zone at first.

But uncomfortable or not, it’s my advice that they either have to take their China business plan full turn, or not do it at all.

Because, guess what happens if you translate your website into Chinese but don’t market it properly? Guess what happens if you run a targeted search engine marketing campaign, but don’t have anybody to answer customer inquiries in Chinese? SLAP! You get slapped with the full force of the expense of your time and money, but don’t get any results.

I think that quite a few Western business people must have gone through a thought process something like this:

Oh, yeah! I can make millions promoting my business in China.
I’ll get ready to make the jump.
But… I better reduce my risk by making some cuts to my budget or limiting the time I spend on this project.

Reducing expenses is smart, but if cuts are made in the wrong places, this is a recipe for a painful failure.

If you do need to keep your expenses down, decrease the scale of the project, but don’t remove any of the components essential for success. To give another analogy, you can decrease the size of the chain you use, but don’t remove links from that chain.

What you need is the ability to move visitors through your entire sales funnel.

Get people to your website, Taobao Store, Weibo or whatever platform you are using. This means marketing. You need an active marketing channel such as SEO, social media or pay per click to drive people to your money maker.
Allow people to move from your landing page to the information they want. This means content. Your website needs to have the content that your target customers are looking for. Plus, the website needs to be designed in such a way that it is easy for people to reach that content and the content needs to be written in such a way that it is easy for people to absorb.
Turn potential customers into customers. This means sales. In almost all cases, you will need a real human being to talk to your potential customers. In rare cases, there are exceptions to this point.

If you aren’t ready to address these three factors, do not enter the Chinese market yet. You’ll get slaughtered by your Chinese competitors. If you are ready to take your China market entry plan all the way, good for you!

Of the three factors I listed above, I’ve noticed that the idea of providing Chinese-language sales and/or support in Chinese during Chinese business hours is often the part that is toughest for Western Internet marketers to understand. But that’s another topic…one we’ll be writing about soon, so if you haven’t already, subscribe!

About the author

Pretty Graphs on Chinese Internet User Demographics, January, 2012

Tait — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 03:28:51 +0000

The CNNIC report for January 2012 came out, so I've updated my graphs to reflect the recent data. The data is up-to-date as of the end of December, 2011.

Highlights:

There are now 513 million Intenet users in China, 56 million more than last year. That's about the same as the total population of USA, Canada, Australia, Germany and the UK.
There are 356 million mobile Internet users in China. 69% of China's Internet users use mobile devides to access the Internet.
There are 136 million rural Chinese Internet users.
Users spend an average of 18.7 hours online per week.
The percentage of users that use the Internet for news decreased from 77.2% to 71.5%.
There are now 194 million online shoppers in China. (Check out our recent post on TMall).
49% of China's Internet Users are microbloggers.
There are now 407 million search engine users in China.

I'll be posting some data specific to mobile Internet users soon. If interested, subscribe if you haven't already.

About the author

China’s Consumer Brands Megasite TMall Grows by Leaps and Bounds

Echo — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 04:05:43 +0000

On Nov 11, 2011, Singles Day, TMall held a massive one-day sale, resulting in a total of 3.36 billion Chinese Yuan in revenue (530 million US Dollars). With massive support from Taobao, TMall has seen incredible growth throughout 2011. In this post I’m going to introduce TMall and explain some of the major changes TMall made in 2011 and early 2012.

TMall’s homepage on Nov.11^th . It says, “Prices From 10 Years Ago” and “50% Off”

What is TMall?

Taobao is the EBay of China – an online C2C and B2C sales platform. TMall is sub-brand of Taobao that is dedicated to official, branded stores. If I were to compare Taobao to a shopping district in China, TMall would be the biggest glitzy department store, while the other Taobao stores would be like the little stores on the streets of China. Anybody can start a store on Taobao. To start a store on TMall, you need to be a brand, and pay a fairly large fee.

TMall has over 70,000 brands such as Nike, Gap, Coach, Nokia and even Chevrolet. If you want to open an online shop in TMall, you need to get verified. If you sell Adidas products, you would need to provide evidence that you are a legal, authorized dealer. You’d have to show where you buy your products and prove that they are real. Also you need to pay a deposit fee. If you’re caught selling fake goods, the deposit fee will be used to pay customer refunds. Besides the deposit, you have to pay a service fee as well.

This provides TMall store owners with several benefits. For one, customers trust TMall more than they trust other online retailers. Trust is a major issue in Chinese e-commerce. Secondly, Taobao pushes TMall stores more than it does other online stores. So, as store owner you get more traffic, and higher converting traffic.

A Taobao search results page. The products from TMall stores (marked with a “T” icon) show up before the products from other Taobao vendors.

On November 1^st, 2010, Taobao announced that TMall would become a stand-alone brand, and they put it on its own domain: TMall.com. They also announced that they would spend 200 million Yuan promoting TMall.

TMall's brand page

TMall’s Record-breaking Shopping Festivals

On Nov 11^th, almost every store on TMall joined in on the sale. With so many products at 40% off, 70% off, or even up to 90% off, people were sitting in front of their computers waiting for midnight to arrive. Sales reached 100 million Yuan within 8 minutes. That’s about 2 million US Dollars per minute. Total sales that day reached 3.36 billion Yuan.

3.42 million people accessed TMall on the first minute of Nov.11^th. This is how was I waiting for the sale!

TMall didn’t stop there though. They announced a follow up sale on Dec 12^th. This time all of Taobao joined it, so the results were even more astounding. Including TMall stores and other Taobao stores, sales reached 4.38 billion in sales in one day.

TMall has been running a Singles Day sale for the past three years, and the sales have increased greatly each time. In 2009, they had sales of 50 million, in 2010, sales increased to 936 million and in 2011, sales reached 3.36 billion.

What made such a huge difference this year?

More and more Chinese people shop online now. (For more info, see our previous post on Chinese Internet user demographics over the past 15 years.)
A lot more brands have joined TMall ove the past 2 years,
Taobao has invested a lot more money in promoting the sale, not only online but offline as well.

TMall ads are everywhere - bus stations, subways….

TMall Jacks Up Fees

Taobao recently increased TMall fees substantially. To have a store in TMall, you must pay both a service fee and a deposit. In October of 2011, the service fee was increased from 6,000 Yuan to 30,000 or 60,000 Yuan. On January 1^st, deposits were raised from 10,000 Yuan to 50,000-150,000 Yuan. Small businesses have dropped out to make way for big-brand stores.

TMall has promised to improve their service for store owners. 1.8 billion Yuan will be spent on improving TMall’s technology and promotions in 2012.

For more info on TMall’s fees, see http://zhaoshang.TMall.com/ (Chinese).

TMall’s Aggressive Advertising

TMall has also adjusted their advertising messages lately. Their previous slogan was “无人上街，不代表没人逛街” which means “Just because nobody’s on the street, doesn’t mean nobody’s shopping”. Their video ad shows empty department stores and streets, as if nobody is buying anything in brick-and-mortar stores because they’re all shopping online at TMall. This slogan angered other retailers though, who saw it as forcing price competition.

In 2011, TMall changed their attitude and came out with the new slogan “让欲望不再失望”, which means “You won’t be disappointed.” What they mean is that TMall is open 24/7, so you can get what you want whenever you want it. It focuses on convenience and opportunity rather than price. The song was written by Hong Kong musician Peter Millward, and has now become quite popular online. The tone of the video presents TMall as a high-class online retailer, which matches their mission to weed out unauthentic products.

TMall’s New Chinese Name

On January 11^th, 2011 TMall changed its Chinese name from 淘宝商城 (Taobao Mall) to 天猫 (Sky Cat), which has a similar pronunciation to “TMall”. Taobao stated that the cat is symbolic of fashion, so it fits TMall well. From the new domain name to the new Chinese brand name, we can see that TMall is becoming more and more independent from Taobao in terms of branding.

TMall is now running a competition for the new logo for 天猫 all over the world with a 600,000 Yuan prize for the winner. Check it out here (English and Chinese).

天猫 is the new Chinese name for TMall.

Online shopping is still newer to Chinese people than it is to Westerners. As Chinese Internet users gain more and more trust in online payment and online shopping in general, the opportunity to sell to them continues to grow. If you’re thinking of selling physical consumer products to Chinese Internet users, Taobao and TMall are the first websites you should familiarize yourself with.

About the author

Echo Hu is a copywriter and social media marketer at Nanjing Marketing Group, where she creates engaging Chinese-language content for websites, newsletters, blogs, text ads and various social media platforms. Echo majored in Communication and Journalism at Nanjing Xiaozhuang University.

What is Baidu Brand Advertising?

Susan — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 08:34:57 +0000

Baidu’s “Brand Promotion” product allows famous brands to display a lot more information about their brand for branded searches. When a Baidu user searches for a brand that uses Baidu’s brand advertising product, they will see text, images and video related to the brand as well as links that lead deeper into the company’s website.

The image below shows the brand advertising in a Baidu search result for "Web English" (韦博英语). As you can see, it includes a title, a description with in-text links, the brand logo, additional category links, a video and an image. The second search result is a full 450 pixels below, giving the brand massive exposure above the fold.

Businesses can setup brand advertising only for their brand. Search keywords that trigger this type of search result may include the brand name as well as products or events related to the brand.

What’s the Benefit?

Enhanced Branding: The larger format and additional media allows brands to make a bigger impact with the searcher.
Provide More Information: The searcher will see more information right on the search results page, allowing them to more easily find the information most relevant to their search.
Greater Control: You gain more control of how your brand is presented to search engine users. Otherwise the user would see about three search results in the top area of the search results page, some of which you likely wouldn’t have any control over.

All of this leads to a better user experience and more sales!

More Examples

You can check out some more examples on Baidu.

How to Sign Up

The price is unique to each company. Not every brand is accepted though. Each brand first needs to go through a verification process.

To sign up you can contact Baidu, or contact Nanjing Marketing Group and we’ll help you.

About the author

Susan Lin worked at Baidu for three years before joining Nanjing Marketing Group as a dedicated pay per click marketing specialist. Her work involves the management of campaigns on Baidu and Google as well as several other ad networks. She holds a degree in Administration from Suzhou University of Economics.

3 Things That Baidu Analytics Does Better Than Google

Samantha — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:14:49 +0000

Baidu Tongji (Analytics) launched some cool new tools this year that provide some functionality not available in Google Analytics: Heat Maps, Site Speed Test and Baidu Index Checker. Let’s take a look!

Baidu Index Checker

This is a great tool for monitoring how many of your website’s pages have been indexed by Baidu. It not only shows you current data, but shows you historical data as well.

I used this tool to test out an idea. I’ve often heard that running a Baidu pay per click campaign is the fastest way to get a website indexed by Baidu. I doubted this was true, so I tested it out to see what would happen.

Below is a screenshot of a client account. We activated a pay per click campaign on November 1^st and the number of indexed pages immediately went up. At this time, we were not doing any other marketing activities for this client. This is only one site, but the effects are quite pronounced. It seems likely that running a Baidu pay per click campaign really gets pages indexed.

Baidu Heat Map

A heat map is used to display the areas of a web page that are clicked most. Baidu provides heat maps along with its Analytics platforms. Although there are English-language options to view heat maps, they still aren’t included in Google Analytics.

If you hover your mouse over an area, you can see how many clicks there were, the traffic source and keywords. You can also see the geographic location of visitors and the browsers they use.

A major drawback is that this data is only available for the past seven days.

Google’s In-Page Analytics report does have some similarities to this. The major difference is that Google’s tool checks the links clicked but does not record the location of the click. For example, in the image below, if 45 people click the “Tours” link up top and 15 people click the “Tours” link in the footer, Google will display 60 clicks for each link. On the plus side, Google’s In-Page Analytics tool will show additional data such as bounce rate and time on site.

Baidu Site Speed Test

As most of our clients are not Chinese companies and many of their websites are hosted in other countries, site performance is often an issue of concern. After all, Chinese Internet users have to be able to load the pages of your website quickly if you want them to convert.

Baidu’s site speed test doesn’t only show you the speed for one page, it actually gives you data for all pages that have Baidu Analytics code installed.

Baidu provides a summary report for all pages.

It also provides a more detailed report for the speed of one page, like Google’s Page Speed Online.

It gives you tips on how to improve your page load time too.

Finally, it even shows you the performance for different regions of China.

Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and Google’s Page Speed Online do provide a similar functionality. Baidu Analytic’s page speed function has two clear advantages:

It works for all pages. Google Analytics samples only some page loads, so the data isn’t always available and isn’t always reliable.
It’s organized in one place rather than being split apart in separate tools as is the case with Google.

To use these tools, you need to first install Baidu Tongji. You don’t need a Baidu pay per click account. The interface is only available in Chinese though.

One more thing: Although this article is about new Baidu Tongji features, it’s important to remember that Baidu Tongji gets along with Baidu Tuiguang (pay per click) very well, similar to how Google AdWords and Google Analytics link up.

About the author

Guest Post on Techrice.com - Groupon's Fake Tissot Watch Incident

Tait — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 09:43:17 +0000

Echo just made a guest post on Groupon China's counterfeit Tissot watch incident, how they dealt with it and what this might mean for Chinese group-buying websites and Chinese e-commerce in general. Check it out on TechRice.com.

TechRice is a great blog about Chinese web startups and major Chinese-language players on the Internet.

About the author