Glogou is a startup offering to help businesses tap into the massive Chinese market, and with the launch of new, self-service tools, it may be able to reach a broader swath of customers.
Language is one of the obvious challenges facing American businesses trying to sell products or services in China. The ad management system for Baidu, the country’s largest search engine, is available only in Chinese, according to Glogou. So the startup recently launched an interface allowing businesses to manage Baidu ad campaigns in English.
The interface itself isn’t the only language barrier, of course — businesses still need to know what kinds of ads they should be running, and what kinds of keywords they should be targeting. But that’s where Glogou’s existing services come in. The company already works with businesses to determine whether there’s an audience in China for their product, and to build marketing campaigns to reach that audience. The new Baidu interface complements those services, allowing Glogou to monitor their campaigns on their own. And it could still be used by new customers who created a campaign without Glogou but would still prefer to work with an English interface.
The company’s other new product is called WAVE, which stands for Web Access & Visibility Evaluator. WAVE focuses on some of the more technical issues in building an online presence in China — whether a business’ website is even accessible from China, whether it shows up in Chinese search engines, and whether their products are being discussed on Chinese social networks. WAVE runs tests, delivers a report outlining how companies are doing at the moment, and what steps they can take to increase their visibility.
Glogou says that its products are based on tools that were first developed by the team while at Stanford University. Customers include Intel, IBM, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The company is self-funded.