Yesterday, Alibaba (China) Network Technology Co., Ltd. confirmed that Alibaba (B2B) had formally sent a notice letter to Beijing Baidu Network Technology Co., Ltd. on October 10, 2008, proposing to terminate the advertising contract; all advertising placements will be stopped in the near future.
The Public and Customer Communication Department of Alibaba (B2B) stated that the termination of advertising placement on Baidu was entirely based on effect considerations. The customer data analysis results showed that the quality of Baidu's traffic has been declining year by year, and there is a considerable proportion of invalid traffic with unknown sources. At the same time, the clicks brought by Baidu do not match the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises.
The issue of the final pricing power of Baidu traffic has always been the focus of industry debate. Analysys International analyzed that a large website traffic does not necessarily bring valuable target users. Only among high-quality netizens with a higher proportion of commercial traffic can valuable target users for enterprises be found. Effective search marketing should bring real commercial user clicks to customers. The amount and quality of commercial traffic are the key to measuring whether a search engine is valuable to enterprise customers. The higher the proportion of commercial traffic, the greater the chance that the enterprise advertisement will achieve actual sales after being clicked.
However, Alibaba believed that Baidu did not accurately distinguish the above-mentioned groups, making it difficult for advertisers to distinguish Baidu traffic.
Previously, when promoting its e-commerce platform, Baidu had repeatedly emphasized the significant value of its search engine traffic, stating that more than one-third of the external traffic of C2C trading platforms such as Taobao came from Baidu. However, at this month's Baidu earnings conference, Robin Li admitted to analysts: "Baidu did not bring much traffic to Taobao in the past."
For this reason, Alibaba has launched a special action plan led by the CEO of B2B, Wei Zhe, to help small and medium-sized enterprises "get through the winter." Among them, the overseas promotion plan of "helping small and medium-sized enterprises attract global buyers" alone has a total investment of $30 million. Alibaba stated that it will increase its investment to help small and medium-sized enterprises get through the winter and provide customers with more cost-effective promotion methods.
Since the end of last year, Taobao has stopped placing advertisements on Baidu and blocked Baidu. Yesterday, Taobao announced that over the past year, Taobao's traffic has continued to rise, increasing by 180% year-on-year, and has now steadily ranked among the top three domestic websites; the transaction volume has increased significantly, growing by 240% year-on-year, and the unit transaction efficiency has further improved. As of September this year, the monthly transaction volume has exceeded 10 billion yuan.