6 tips to improve ROI of information flow advertising!

Everyone is familiar with information flow advertising, and many people have invested in it, but the results are unsatisfactory and vary. For advertisers, the biggest ideal is effect. Without effect, the money will be wasted. So how to improve ROI? What are the requirements for placing information flow ads? Today I will talk to you all;

1. First, analyze potential customers

Analyze where these potential customers can be found and what aspects they will consider when choosing our products. For example, if my company is engaged in decoration, I must first analyze the geographical scope that my business can cover, the attributes of the houses (villas, high-end residences, ordinary residences, apartments, large areas, regular sizes, small areas, shops, offices), customer income level, gender, age, marriage, childbearing, Internet access time, terminal type, operating system, APP type (education, travel, shopping, games, parent-child, life, music, sports, business, news, entertainment, social, finance, pictures and videos), etc. The analysis needs to be applied to advertising and considered from the consumer’s perspective:

1. What pain points do my products and services solve for customers? What is the core value experience I bring to customers?

2. Why do users pay attention to my products and services? That is, how to attract users' attention?

3. Which customer groups are my products and services mainly targeted at, and in what scenarios are they most suitable?

4. What are the advantages of my products and services compared with those of my competitors?

5. When potential customers choose a supplier, what are the core criteria for their decision? What are the highlights that I can use to attract customers?

Each of the above questions is crucial, from attracting customers' attention to letting customers know you after they pay attention, and finally letting customers choose you! Design the advertising logic content sequentially according to the logic;

two. Advertising picture design

The advertising images of information flow ads are generally divided into two types: large images and three small images. In different advertising media, the specifications of images are not exactly the same. It depends on the specific requirements of the media. However, it is generally recommended to do one or two media first, such as Baidu Information Flow and Tencent Zhihuitui. At the same time, when doing the same media, it is also recommended to make at least 2 sets of advertising image materials and landing pages at the same time, using different styles. Advertising materials and landing pages generally have different styles such as luxury version, retro version, fresh version, simple version, and rustic version. Which style is suitable depends on the industry, product, target audience, etc. In the same decoration industry, tailor-made villas may be suitable for luxurious style, villas in elite areas may prefer retro or European and American style, the middle class may like fresh style, while courtyard houses or some relocated households prefer rustic styles (no sarcasm, just hypothetical examples, please do not take it personally), and so on.

three. Logical order of landing page content

The design of the landing page must take into account the promotion target assessment KPI content, which is generally divided into:

1. Sign up for activities, mainly displayed in H5, focusing on attracting users to fill in contact information, mostly through activities, promotions, product categories and other highlights;

2. For product sales, online payment, cash on delivery, purchase of discount coupons, and discount coupons are often set as discounts and free shipping. In addition to the brand’s own official activities, online payment methods are rarely used, and most of them are cash on delivery.

3. APP downloads, mostly games, special-function APPs, etc. For this type of goal, it is usually OK to directly describe the core functions;

4. Register and submit forms, mostly to collect sales leads, such as service industries, decoration, financial loans, investment and financial management, etc.

Except for APP downloads, the other three need to reflect sufficient logic on the landing page. Generally speaking, the longer the user's visit time, the lower the bounce rate, and the greater the possibility of achieving the advertiser's goal. Generally speaking, in terms of setting logic, taking cash on delivery as an example, the landing page logic is generally:

1) Description of user pain point scenarios (to resonate with the audience)

2) The distress and consequences caused (worrying mentality)

3) Solutions provided by the product (user needs)

4) Brand rendering (trust enhancement)

5) Risk assessment and competitive product comparison (eliminating doubts)

6) Third-party evaluation (common psychology)

In addition to the above logical order, the order function will always be displayed on the interface. The more common and easily accepted location is the footer.

Four. Setting up and testing in-feed ads

The structure of an information flow advertising account generally consists of three levels: orders, plans, and ad spaces. The flexible use of each level will be discussed in a separate article later. Here we will first discuss audience targeting. The following parameters should be set:

1. Region: When you first place an ad, the region can be all the areas that the company can cover. Since there is no historical data to support the judgment of which specific area has the best effect, you should try to cover all areas involved in the promotion business at the beginning. After a round of placement, adjust the regional targeting based on the test results.

2. For target audience industry, it is recommended to test both targeted fixed industries and full industry coverage. For full industry coverage, the budget can be controlled appropriately, but when comparing the effects, the targeted industry and the full industry must have the same comparison conditions, such as the delivery area, time period, bid, ad image and landing page, that is, A/B testing, so as to determine whether industry targeting is necessary, because in many industries, the crowd targeting results are not necessarily better than the full industry selection effect;

3. Gender: It is recommended not to be gender-discriminatory during initial testing, and not to assume that parent-child education is better for women, beauty is better for women, and decoration is better for men. Even if the test conclusion is true, it is recommended to conduct tests without gender distinction in the initial stage and let the data speak for itself. Empiricism can easily harm people. A real case is that we once placed an advertisement for a client who sold men's trousers, and quite a few female users actually made transactions. Because advertising is mainly aimed at customers rather than users, whether the person who buys your products is a man or a woman does not depend on who the products are for, but on the ideas of the copywriting and landing pages, and which highlights are mainly focused on. Selling combs to monks and British sweatpants to women is not a rare thing.

4. Age group: This setting is critical, but it is recommended to target all age groups during testing. After the preliminary data model is established, detailed operation settings can be made. Similarly, when placing advertisements, it is still necessary to distinguish between customers and users.

5. Interests and hobbies are very interesting targeting conditions. If I say that most advertising media do not have big data for this parameter, many people will sneer or spit coffee in my face. But it is actually true, because there are too few companies that can obtain big data on interests and hobbies. Only BAT, major portals and Toutiao have some data. Other DSP companies talk about interests and hobbies, but that is purely a conceptual card. Mastering interests and hobbies is equivalent to grasping the lifeline of customers. Why should these big companies share it with others and become their competitors? Think about it, if I can really get people's interest data by purchasing some traffic, then I am definitely willing to borrow money and give these big companies tens of thousands of dollars to be their traffic agent, and then analyze the data of 100 million users in second-tier cities, and then call these people every day, recommending everything from daily necessities to investment and financial products to high-end luxury goods, and I will definitely make a lot of money, but this is impossible.

6. Mobile phone models and operating systems are also supported by data. There is no law that stipulates that rich people must use high-end and high-priced mobile phones.

7. During the promotion period, many people did not mention this content. I don’t know why. But what I want to say is that in the early stage, try to select all times other than sleeping time at night, and for some industries such as games and health products, you can even test them around the clock. Of course, if you can get the historical data of other old customers of Baidu and Tencent Toutiao, that would be a different matter.

five. Test promotion data tracking and analysis

The purpose of advertising is to acquire customers, sell products, and make a profit. Because every advertiser and every product has its own unique attributes, when placing advertisements, you must remain calm, analyze carefully, and pay attention to data.

Although information flow advertising is good, it is not the savior of enterprises. It can even be said to be the death warrant for more enterprises!

Because the emergence of every new thing will inevitably have a huge impact on society, and the result of the impact is to change the overall situation of related industries and fields. For example, with the rise of Baidu search engine, many traditional companies have reduced their sales costs and gained more customer opportunities by using search engines. If their peers fail to keep up, they will inevitably accelerate their demise. Now that information flow is developing rapidly, advertisers have a new channel to acquire customers, and some industries and advertisers have benefited from it. Of course, there are also many advertisers who only try it out for a short time and give up on the information flow channel after failing to achieve good results.

In this regard, I think there are reasons related to media sales, who exaggerated the effect and role of information flow, and gave up testing and delivering information flow when it showed no effect or failed to achieve the expected effect after a simple test. There are also reasons related to operations personnel, who did not conduct in-depth analysis on why the expected effect was not achieved and how to continue to optimize. Of course, the bigger problem lies with the advertisers themselves. The advertiser is equivalent to a patient. In fact, each of us is sick, but the degree is different and the ideas are different, so we just don't go to see a doctor. For example, the heart, kidney, liver, spleen, stomach, intestines, skin, ears, eyes, teeth, athlete's foot, armpit odor, obesity, thinness, and sub-health are all diseases, but we just don't pay attention to them or accept our fate. If you want to be cured, the biggest problem is not the hospital or the doctor, but yourself, your confidence in yourself and the doctor you are seeing. Follow the doctor's advice, strengthen your exercise, pay attention to your work and rest schedule, eat a healthy diet, avoid arrogance and impatience and maintain a good mood, and your body will naturally recover over time. The same is true for advertising. Advertisers need to have confidence in the channels and operators, reasonably plan the content of the advertising work, control the rhythm of the advertising, and manage the advertising process. The effect will naturally get better and better!

As for the focus of this section, data tracking and analysis, in fact, anyone with a little experience knows that it is nothing more than conducting A/B tests on materials and landing pages one by one to determine and analyze the popular material landing pages, and at the same time analyze the preferred parameters for conditions such as region, population, delivery time period, hobbies, industry, mobile phone model, operating system, browser, etc.

six. Ad optimization and delivery improvement

Data tracking and analysis serves the purpose of optimization. After analyzing the landing pages of excellent materials and finding the optimal parameters, you can use a powerful combination to combine into a new delivery plan. If the new settings show improved delivery effects, you can increase the delivery volume and continue to deliver. If there is an improvement but the expected value has not yet been reached, continue to optimize the material landing page and use the preferred condition combination for delivery.

Advertising optimization is a long process and a meticulous technical job. Operations personnel need to always maintain a spirit of upward mobility and excellence, and business owners also need to understand operations personnel. Only by working together can you ultimately find a delivery method that suits your own business and products.

Author: Information flow expert

Source: Zhihu