Baidu SEM With Account Opening and ICP Filing

Plan for eight to twelve weeks before the first click, and treat any shorter quote as a warning. Account opening at Baidu runs three to six weeks and cannot begin without a Chinese business licence or a licensed local representative acting for you. ICP filing for a mainland-hosted landing page takes two to four weeks more and overlaps only partly. A vendor promising a live account in a fortnight is opening it on somebody else's licence, and the account frozen in a later review is yours, along with the prepayment sitting in it. What opening actually involves: A scan of the business licence of the entity that will advertise. A trademark certificate or an authorisation letter where the brand is not yours. Category qualification documents where the category demands them, which in our fields means energy trading, anything medical-adjacent, and finance. A framework fee to the authorised channel plus a media prepayment, both of which we put in writing at current numbers before you commit to anything. And the ICP filing itself, which is tied to a mainland host and a China-registered entity, so it cannot be arranged afterwards by pointing a domain at a Chinese network. The site is part of the account: Baidu will serve your ad to a phone on China Mobile. A page hosted in Europe, behind a network with no mainland presence, loads slowly enough that the click is bought and abandoned before anything renders. We measure real load time from inside the mainland before launch, and we will refuse to open the account against a page that fails it. There is no bid adjustment that repairs a page which does not appear. Where Chinese search converts: Not the form. Buyers open Shangqiao and start typing. If nobody answers in Chinese during Beijing business hours, the campaign has no conversion path at all, and this is the most common reason a competently built Baidu account produces nothing. We wire chat sessions back as conversions, agree with your team what a qualified chat is, and measure the account on those rather than on clicks or form submissions. We do not staff the chat. We design the coverage and tell you plainly what it costs in headcount before you commit to the media. The build: Keyword research in Phoenix Nest, written in Simplified Chinese by a writer rather than a translation memory. Match types behave differently from Google's, and Baidu's phrase matching is looser than a Google buyer expects, so negatives carry most of the structural load and are built before launch rather than harvested from waste afterwards. Baidu Tongji installed with goals defined against the chat. Brand Zone considered on its own economics: it is a fixed-fee product, worth buying when brand search volume already exists and a poor way to manufacture it. Not included: WeChat, Douyin, Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, and marketplace advertising on Tmall or JD. Store operations. Full site translation. Company formation and tax advice, which belongs with a firm licensed to give it. And any account opened through a borrowed licence, a proxy individual or an offshore route; we decline the engagement rather than carry that risk on your behalf. Who this is not for: Brands unwilling to register an entity or appoint a licensed representative. Regulated categories that cannot produce their qualification documents. Anyone wanting to test China with a small budget over one month, which buys a result you cannot learn anything from and an opinion about China you will repeat for years.