Baidu SEM with Account Opening and Qualification Filing

How long it takes and what actually blocks it: Four to six weeks from the day your documents are complete, and the documents are the whole job. Baidu will not open an account for a foreign advertiser on the strength of a website. You need a business licence Baidu accepts, an ICP filing for the landing domain if it is hosted in the mainland, a first deposit in the region of 5,000 to 6,000 CNY plus a one-time opening fee around 1,200 CNY, and for anything pharmaceutical or medical a category qualification pack nobody can accelerate. Those four to six weeks are document assembly. Creating the account itself takes days. The thing we will not do: Open your account under somebody else's business licence. This is the standard shortcut offered by cheap resellers, and it is why so many foreign brands eventually discover that the account, the filing, the domain record and the unspent deposit belong to an agency they have stopped paying. If your licence position makes a properly held account impossible today, we will say so and decline the work rather than route around it. We also do not run gambling on Baidu, in any wrapper, for any operator. It is illegal in the mainland and there is no conversation to have about it. What running it is actually like: Phoenix Nest is not the Google interface with different labels. Match types behave differently, and phrase match subdivides in ways that surprise anyone assuming Google semantics. oCPC bidding runs in two stages, and the second stage does not engage until the first has accumulated enough conversion volume, which means the opening six to eight weeks are deliberately manual and the account looks worse before it works. We say this at the start, because otherwise it reads as failure in week four. Baidu Tongji goes on the site before launch. Without it there is no conversion data inside the platform at all, and you will be steering from your own analytics while the bidder steers from nothing. We exclude the Baidu partner network from the first day. It carries a real share of available volume and a worse quality profile, and the trade is deliberate: lower impression counts, cleaner conversion data. If your internal reporting rewards traffic volume this will cause an argument, and it is better to have that argument now than in month three. Landing pages: A site hosted outside the mainland loads slowly enough to change your conversion rate materially, and Baidu's own landing assessment reads speed and content depth. We specify what the page needs: the hosting decision, Chinese copy written rather than translated, and an enquiry path built on WeChat or a phone number instead of a Western contact form. Your team or a local partner builds it. We do not. Regulated categories: Imported pet food requires GACC registration before the product can lawfully be sold, and Baidu will ask about it. Medical device advertising requires an approved advertising review number. Internet pharmaceutical information services require their own certificate. We assemble the dossier with your regulatory contact and submit it. Where a certificate does not yet exist, the honest sequence is regulatory first and advertising second, and we will not open an account to sit idle while you obtain one. What you get: The opened account in your own name, the qualification dossier as a file you keep, keyword and campaign build, Tongji configuration, and supervised delivery through the oCPC stage transition. Reporting is in English. Everything said to Baidu is said in Chinese, by us.