• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, July 28, 2016

Baidu, China's major search engine, made a push to strengthen its global footprint Thursday through a partnership with U.S.-based mobile marketing company TUNE.

Peter Hamilton, TUNE CEO, told Search Marketing Daily that Baidu began running tests to integrate HasOffers in March, but the two companies are just now making the announcement public. In China, TUNE also works with Cheetah Media Link, and Mobisummer. In the U.S., some of those names include Starbucks, Staples and Zillow.

"Traditionally, China has been a difficult market for software companies to enter," Hamilton said, referring to U.S.-based companies. Once Baidu made the move it allowed the company to grow revenue at a much faster pace.

Since Baidu launched with HasOffers on March 1, Baidu has been growing revenue at 150% month-over-month through HasOffers, Hamilton estimates.

Hamilton said Baidu uses HasOffers as a back-end service layer for its mobile network to manage publishers and advertisers, which means creating invoices to pay partners. It's a white label platform, so they can run their own ad network on the service without having to build their own platform.

Baidu has a large network in which they serve advertisements on the engine's properties as well as those that belong to partners.

TUNE will let Baidu drive performance for its in-house marketing programs, and help the DU Ad Platform to support advertisers by allowing them to reach customers globally. 

For publishers, the platform calculates ad conversions, automatically determining Baidu's payout to partners.