The figure of Cost Per Click (CPC) for Baidu PPC Advertising depends on rankings, bids and quality scores of you and your competitors, and your CPCs wouldn’t exceed the bids you set for your keywords in Baidu Marketing tool for PPC (Baidu Tuiguang).
- Under this mechanism of auction model, the cost per click of any keyword would never exceed the bid you set (unless otherwise set).
General formula for Cost Per Click of Baidu PPC:
- If your keyword is the last one among all PPC results, or your keyword is the only displayable PPC result, then your click price would be the lowest impression price of this keyword.
Please note that the higher the quality score of a keyword is, the lower the lowest impression price of the keyword is.
For example, four Baidu PPC clients promote a search query – “flower ordering” for Beijing area. The rankings of keywords from A, B, C and D are determined by Quality Score*Bid. And the click price of each keyword for the clients are calculated as in the table below.
| Keyword | Bid | Quality Score | Ranking | |
| Client A | Order flowers | 3.6 | 1 | 1 |
| Client B | Buy flowers | 2.5 | 1.4 | 2 |
| Client C | Book flowers | 4 | 0.7 | 3 |
| Client D | Order flowers | 3 | 0.9 | 4 (Last) |
Notes:
- Under this formula, the cost per click of any keyword would never exceed the bid you set (unless otherwise set).
- The higher the quality score is, the lower the cost per click is. So, you need to constantly optimize the quality score to reduce your promoting fees and improve your ROI.
- The competitive context could change anytime, so even if your bids are constant, your cost per click of one same keyword could vary over the time.
What’s a bid for Baidu PPC Advertising?
Bid is the highest price you’d like to pay for one click. Baidu’s pricing system would ensure the actual cost per click wouldn’t be over your bid, and it could be far below your bid in some cases.
Your bid and quality score of your keyword would affect your rankings together. With the same quality score, the higher your bid is, the higher your ranking would be.
Therefore, you should set your bids based on potential value that a keyword may bring to your business and set a relatively high bid in your affordable range to ensure high rankings and better promotion.
Bids fall into keyword group bids and keyword bids. Keywords of similar meanings and the same structure are partitioned into one keyword group, and these keywords basically share the same business value, so you could set one flat price for them as a group.
If you want to set prices for certain keywords, you could also set keyword bids on keyword/originality list pages.
If one certain keyword is bid individually as well as as a part of a group, the individual price would prevail.