Major search engine marketing platforms in China like Qihoo 360 and Baidu offer a variety of SEM ad formats for their advertisers. For instance, brands may adopt different ad formats such as product display format, navigation format, and site link format for different marketing purposes. Also, these platforms allow advertisers to display a maximum of 2 ad formats in the same ad on the result page simultaneously, such that more images or links can be shown in the ad.

So, the next question is, what ad formats shall we adopt for an SEM campaign? We have three suggestions to help you make the decision rapidly.

Solution 1: Search your competitors' ads, then refer to the ad formats they adopted.

Solution 2: Adopt 3-4 ad formats parallelly to conduct an A/B Test, then keep only the best combinations in click-through rate or conversion rate according to the statistics.

Solution 3:Choose the ad formats aligning with the purpose of your campaigns, such as lead generations and product sales.

We have to accumulate data day by day and analyze them during optimization for the 1st and the 2nd solution. For the 3rd solution, here we provide the strategies for both major promotional purposes, respectively, based on the ad formats offered by Qihoo 360.

1. Lead generation: We suggest using image-text, navigation, list, and form formats for lead generation campaigns. These ad formats allow users to be familiar with the core information shared by the brands, like what products or services they provide and the costs. Therefore, users may read on for further information they are interested in or even leave their contact information directly.

2. Product sales: We suggest using image-text, product display, and product express for product sales campaigns. These ad formats allowed brands to show their sales events, featured products, and respective costs, encouraging users to browse their product or sales event detail page with a shortcut link, leading to direct sales.

If you want to know more about the latest news about digital marketing in China, don't hesitate to contact our marketing experts: enquiry@so360.hk.