This July, I posted a post on Baidu Tongji, the Web analytics tool developed by Baidu, now it has opened to the community of Baidu Union. Unlike any other analytics tool that can be found on the Web, Baidu Tongji is designed for the internal use of its Baidu Union members. The available of Baidu Tongji allowed the Baidu Union members get a practical insight on what happened to their sites, thus increasing the business value of the sites’ investment. However, the registered members must copy and paste the given tracking code (cookies) from Baidu Tongji onto their sites to enable the visitors tracking, and the tracking will begin after approx. one hour. The report of this Baidu Tongji will show the page view, unique IP, number of visitors, number of new visitors, repeat visitors, referrals, keyword comparison and etc of a given member’s site.

It seems the launched of this Baidu Tongji is Baidu’s plan to tightly integrate the analytics tool with Web sites that used Baidu advertisements. And hopefully the Web sites holders can take the action from the report or insight gained therein. To provide insight that one Baidu Union member can use to improve her Web site will in turn help growing the Baidu advertisement market in China.

If you follow closely on TagEdge, you’ll notice that the frequency of my blog entries on Baidu. No doubt Baidu is a company that surprised a lot of people and they have done very well especially in the Internet arena in China. Sometimes when I talk about Baidu, I know their success can considered virtually assured. But are Baidu really as competition-proof as we think?

As far as I observe, Baidu never been inflated their egos. They have increased their competitive weapon, Baidu Union commission scheme to a much higher payout in order to reward those loyal Web sites that used the Baidu advertisements. A Web site that used Baidu advertisement will be entitled to a minimum 50% to a maximum 84% of commission payout when it meet the criteria set by Baidu. In contrary, before the change took in effect from September 1, 2007, the maximum payout for this Baidu pay-per-click is only 70%. Under the new commission scale, Baidu agreed to payout until 84%, an increased of 14%, as shown in the above picture.

This move will make any Baidu would-be competitor increasingly difficult in penetrating the China search engine market. Meanwhile, there are some articles reported that Baidu have launched its “Baidu TV,” a sort of video advertisement where the selected Web sites by Baidu can embed this type of video advertisement onto their sites, albeit that I haven’t seen it yet, I can understand why the record of Baidu competitors are so dismal when they compete with Baidu in the past.