Alibaba advertising, Alibaba advertising resources, Alibaba advertising formats

If I am a Taobao seller, how can I use Alibaba's marketing products to place advertisements?

If I am not a Taobao seller, can I still use Alibaba’s marketing products?

For novice advertisers, it is not an easy task to understand all the marketing products under Alibaba. This article does not discuss operations or details, but comprehensively analyzes the layout and connections of Alibaba's marketing products from a bird's eye view.

01Overview of Alibaba Advertising Resources

In addition to Taobao, where else will our advertisements on Alibaba be displayed?

Your advertisement may appear in every APP. For a company as big as Alibaba, the number of apps it owns is larger than you can imagine. The APP in the picture below is just an example.

Taobao resources: refers to Taobao, which is the main advertising platform for sellers in Taobao;

Taobao resources: mainly include UC Browser, Youku and Tudou, etc., which are owned by Alibaba. The advertising formats are common search bidding, information flow and video ads. All advertisers can place ads;

Cooperating media: mainly cooperative media resources that are not directly affiliated with Alibaba. Taobao sellers can use Alibaba’s Uni Desk (similar to DSP) to place advertisements on cooperative media traffic.

02 Alibaba’s three major marketing platforms

After understanding Alibaba’s advertising media resources, you can start placing advertisements. Alibaba has three marketing platforms: Alimama, Alibaba Innovation Business Group Intelligent Marketing Platform, and YES Advertising Trading Platform. Different advertisers can choose according to their own advertising needs.

1. Alimama

Alimama is Alibaba's integrated marketing platform based on big data, including a series of marketing delivery solutions such as CPC, CPM, CPT, DSP, and DMP. The main products launched include: Direct Express, Smart Diamond (Raw Diamond Exhibition), Pinxiaobao and Taobao Affiliate.

Through Train: CPC payment

Through Train is a pay-per-click marketing promotion tool that displays the promotion methods of matching products through keywords on the buyer's search results page to achieve accurate promotion of products. In fact, it is also a replica of the search engine's keyword bidding model.

Currently, the through train is divided into two modes: standard promotion and smart promotion. Standard promotion is the traditional model of self-selected keywords and participating in bidding; smart promotion only requires selecting the promotion product and the bid upper limit, and using machine intelligence to select the keyword delivery model.

According to the actual delivery situation, the through train promotion effect of the intelligent promotion mode is better than that of the standard promotion mode.

Zhizuan: CPM/CPC payment

Zhizuan is a display and promotion platform that provides real-time bidding for precise traffic across the entire network, supporting both charging by display and charging by click. The advertisements can be in the form of videos or pictures, and the display media include Taobao, Tmall, Sina Weibo, NetEase, Youku Tudou and dozens of other media inside and outside Taobao.

There are two main forms of promotion: attracting traffic to products or stores.

To attract customers: The difficulty lies in the choice of orientation. In addition to intelligent orientation, it can also be used with Dharma disk;

To attract traffic to your store: It is recommended that novices test high-quality resources on the site first, and the number of test resource locations should not exceed 5.

Pinxiaobao: CPM payment

Pinxiaobao is the legendary first-screen advertisement on Taobao’s search results page, which is provided through a bidding method for brand traffic packages. The ad space with the highest bid will be displayed at the top of the search results page.

The keywords that can be purchased must be extended words with brand words, so they are only available to consumer groups who are aware of the brand. It is similar to the brand area of ​​Baidu search.

Taobao customer: CPS payment

Taobao Affiliate is a distribution promotion model. After the seller confirms to open Taobao Affiliate, he/she should set a certain commission rate to allow Taobao Affiliate to promote the product. Taobao Affiliates uses some of its own channels, such as chat tools, social platforms, websites, etc., to help merchants promote and facilitate transactions to earn commissions.

With the rise of short videos, Taobao's promotion channels have also shifted to short video platforms such as Douyin.

Dharmapan, Uni Dsek and Alibaba Databank

Whether it is Direct Express, Smart Diamond or Pinxiaobao, they are all products of the PC era. The method of creating hot products through through trains and then driving traffic to the entire store has become less effective as consumer demand changes.

If you want to achieve refined advertising, the first step is to understand consumers. Alibaba sets up a Uni ID for each consumer based on Alibaba’s multi-dimensional data, such as basic data on consumption characteristics, such as category preferences, consumption level, age, purchase intention, etc. Identify each consumer and their individual intent.

Dharmapan, also known as alimama-DMP, contains a wealth of user tags to help merchants find target consumers through targeting. Uni Desk is a supplement to Taobao’s media resources and can be understood as DSP. Whether it is the delivery within Taobao or the delivery outside Taobao through Uni Desk, the data will eventually be deposited in Alibaba Data Bank. Data sedimentation can be used in the following aspects, including customer insights, marketing sedimentation applications, asset health, brand dashboards, data hubs, etc.

2. Alibaba Innovation Business Group Intelligent Marketing Platform

The main distribution channels of Alibaba Innovation Business Group’s intelligent marketing platform are UC Browser and Shenma Search. There is a wealth of information content on UC Browser, and information flow is its main form of advertising. As the second largest search engine on mobile devices, Shenma Search also mainly relies on keyword bidding.

Search bidding ads

Shenma Search only has a mobile version, not a PC version. In the entire mobile search market, Shenma Search ranks second only to Baidu Search with a market share of 14.61%.

Since they are all search engines, the promotion method is to purchase keywords and bid to obtain advertising display. If you have done SEM, I believe you are not unfamiliar with it.

Search Brand Zone

In addition to regular bidding, Shenma Search also has a brand search area. This area is similar to Baidu's brand search area. It is a fixed placement method that displays the ads at the top of the search results page by purchasing brand-related word packages.

Information flow advertising

UC Browser, which has over 600 million monthly active users and over 100 million daily active users, can also run information flow ads.

Display advertising

In addition to the above-mentioned performance-based ads, it also supports the placement of display ads that appear on the APP opening screen.

3.YES Advertising Exchange

Youku Tudou officially became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alibaba in 2016. Currently, the YES advertising trading platform is the independent advertising trading platform of the Youku Business Group under Alibaba Culture and Entertainment Group. It completes advertising traffic transactions by accessing media advertising traffic and DSP platforms.

The main form of advertising is video advertising. Including common advertising formats: pre-post, mid-post, post-post, pause, corner label, mobile full screen, mobile pre-post, mobile pause, partial page resources and the new information flow advertising format. The following is a pre-video ad.

03 How do advertisers choose products to place?

Given Alibaba's massive global traffic, it should be able to meet the advertising needs of all advertisers in a broad sense.

1. Advertisers from all industries

If you are an advertiser in a non-e-commerce industry, you can also choose Alibaba Innovation Business Group’s intelligent marketing platform and YES advertising trading platform to place information flow, search bidding and video ads.

The characteristics of UC Browser's information flow delivery are that it is difficult to control the flow and it is highly volatile. Suitable industries for investment include: games, e-commerce, finance, APP downloads, etc.

The overall click-through rate of Shenma Search's bidding ads is much higher than that of Baidu, 360 and other channels, and is suitable for the financial and gaming industries.

Youku Tudou’s video ads are more suitable for advertisers with brand promotions, and the most common ones are fast-moving consumer goods brand ads.

2. E-commerce industry: small and medium-sized advertisers

If you are an advertiser in the e-commerce industry, especially a seller on Taobao, you can promote your products and stores through Alimama.

Small and medium-sized sellers are more concerned about the actual effects of advertising. Through Train and Smart Diamond can meet the needs of small and medium-sized sellers to attract new customers and increase sales.

When attracting new customers, the focus is on indicators such as clicks, favorites, add to cart, and follows rather than ROI. For products with a higher average order value, priority will be given to testing experienced Taobao/Tmall visitors and visitors with high spending amounts; for products with a lower average order value, priority will be given to testing visitors who like discounted products and visitors with high purchase frequency. Dharmapan’s crowd selection can be synchronized to the Through Train and Smart Diamond to obtain more accurate new customers.

After you have attracted enough new customers, you can then consider harvesting and converting them. By targeting the selected groups of people who use the through train and the people who add items to the shopping cart and add items to the collection of Zhizuan’s stores, you can get a good ROI.

When the product enters a stable decline period, you can stabilize the traffic and conversion effect by adjusting the through train's key words and long-tail word traffic, crowd tags, regions and other delivery settings. At the same time, we will gradually control the traffic of Zhizuan, stabilize the store traffic, and prepare for the next stage of new products.

3. E-commerce industry: big brand advertisers

For large brand advertisers with sufficient budgets, they hope to gain better insights into consumer motivations through Alimama’s data capabilities.

For example, Mars used Alibaba's data bank to find that consumers prefer Li Yifeng rather than Angelbaby as the spokesperson for Dove chocolate. Therefore, we challenged the materials on the store homepage and other banners to strengthen Li Yifeng's image. In the marketing scenario, new demands for customized Valentine's Day chocolates and Christmas chocolates are explored. When the popularity of office snacks increases, seize the marketing opportunity to carry out pre-promotion and achieve good sales.

If you need to place an Alibaba series advertisement, please contact Qinggua Media official

Author: Song Xing

Source: Song Xing’s Digital View