The Great Firewall

Do you advertise in China?

If you’re like the vast majority of advertisers, probably not.

If you’re focusing mostly on Google Ads, almost definitely not.

But amazingly, it’s possible – just not easy.

Within China, not many people attempt to use Google, since basic Google use is blocked by The Great Firewall, which is an aspect of Chinese censorship. 1.1 billion people there use the Internet on the regular. For Search, they use services like Baidu. Other familiar names are mainstays of content, commerce, etc.

If you look up the reach offered by Google Ads to a typical country, it’s large. Brazil targeting offers access to 185,000,000 devices. China: only 10.4 million.

People residing in mainland China who are motivated to use Google can probably do so using a VPN or other workarounds.

What’s interesting is that in our experience, those 10.4 million are a good target audience, if your business happens to be advertising globally. It’s just a very small “country.” For one client, we saw conversion rates consistently above the global average – on a par with New Zealand, and just slightly behind the U.S. and U.K.

What’s also interesting is to consider what might happen if that audience grew 10x. Fun!