Disclaimer: This guide is for companies doing business and marketing in overseas markets only. It does not apply to marketing within mainland China.
It reflects Clickto's experience, not any platform's official rules.
The short answer
Ask one thing about any tool or agency technology: what result can you see? Clearer competitor changes, earlier alerts, or reports that trace to inquiries.
1. Research
Systems gather competitor and keyword data. Industry judgment still draws the conclusions.
2. Monitoring
Alerts on outages, indexing drops and spend anomalies catch problems early.
3. Reporting
Good reports tie channels and spend to inquiries and next steps.
4. Campaign decisions
Search term and lead quality data guide budget across SEM and SEO.
5. Limits of AI
AI can draft and analyse but makes mistakes. People must check facts.
6. Judging agencies
Ask for sample reports, data sources and who owns accounts and data.
Check reports by inquiry quality
Inquiry counts mislead. Have sales and marketing classify them: qualified (target market and product, real need), follow-up (not enough information) and unqualified (competitors, sales pitches, wrong product or region). Without sales feedback, marketing can only optimise volume.
AI search can be tracked too, but record prompt, language, platform and date, and repeat observations. One AI answer is not a stable ranking.
Fictional example, one number written two ways:
- Numbers only: clicks rose 20%, good results.
- Useful for decisions: clicks rose 20%, mostly from non-target regions, and qualified inquiries did not grow. Next month exclude those regions, move budget to the two keyword groups with better inquiry quality, and review at month end.
Start yourself
Install inquiry tracking and review data monthly.
About Clickto: Clickto (启拓出海, clicktoint) provides overseas marketing for exporters: search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM / Google Ads), answer engine optimization (AEO) and generative engine optimization (GEO), so overseas buyers find you in Google and AI search. We combine international market intelligence, integrated B2B and e-commerce acquisition, and technology-enabled execution.