How would you spend a 1 million budget? 4 major platform optimization methods!

Many new friends have no idea where to start in this industry, and they must have searched for a lot of useful information on the Internet. But the most important point is to find your own value, and you will soon be able to do it with ease.

So what is the value of optimization?

Taking the above figure as an example, excluding other variables, the promotion effect of B is better than A in terms of cost, users, and recovery effect. This simple comparison of numbers (for example only) shows that for companies with sufficient cash flow, B can bring more cash flow. For development companies, B can maximize the effect of limited budget, which is the value.

As a person with a science background, I like to use analogies. The control of bids and budgets for each account can be understood as driving a car.

In the early stages, test each position more often, plan more, plan more, plan more, say it three times.

Try to make the account start to consume the budget steadily, pull out hourly consumption data, and adjust bids to control the consumption rate. If you are a madman who posts 1-300 plans every day, you will soon find a plan with good conversions and gradually optimize costs.

The author has heard some agents complain that when small companies ask them to help with optimization, they are often blamed for high costs in the early stages due to limited budgets. Actually, it is not the case. Remember that exposure comes before activation. Testing will bring certain costs. It is like stepping on the gas pedal when the car is about to drive out.

To change our thinking, if we take budget and ROI as the final assessment, then cost is only a reference for conversion in the middle. In this way, there will be much more room for operation. We can increase the intensity of testing, pay high prices for high-quality users, and so on.

Below, the author shares some features (niao) (xing) of several platforms that I have frequently used in the past, for your reference!

1. Guangdiantong / Zhihuitui / WeChat mp

Recommended ★★★ Cost ★★☆ ROI ★★☆

The quality of Tencent's iOS is relatively good in the few games I have played. This is unavoidable because the difficulty of passing material review is much greater than the difficulty of optimizing accounts.

Let’s first talk about Guangdiantong/Zhihuitui, the love-hate twins that have now merged. The initial cost of iOS is relatively high, so try several locations with good cost performance, such as the banner at the bottom of the official account , browser group pictures, browser small pictures, and Tencent video picture locations. There are many native positions and they are complex. Do not modify bids frequently or drastically.

Export the device number with good game payment history, expand each crowd package to 3-5 million and throw it into the targeted use, it will be relatively easy to run out of activation (Note: if your crowd package has different locations, then you should also pay attention to the planned location. For example, taking the package in the news position and throwing it in the video position may be invalid). Once o cpa is usable, we can shift our focus to optimizing quality and recycling.

Compared with other platforms, GuangDianTong's response speed is relatively slow, including plan switches, directional modifications, bid adjustments, etc. Therefore, you should formulate a delivery strategy in advance. In the early stage, you can also use a pen to record the account status of each time period.

I often test plans in the afternoon. If I want to get exposure around 2 or 5 o'clock, I usually start the plan at 1:30 or 4:20. In the middle of the account, you can copy the plan with good results, and reopen the copied new plan after the original plan declines. This method is very useful in GuangDianTong. The plan with good results can be very "long-lasting". Under the condition of stable costs, you can control the budget reasonably every day.

There is no need to pile up plans for WeChat mp. The platform's operating space is not large, and the budget should not be restricted too much. After all, everyone is competing for traffic . Put more attention on material optimization. The public account location is more cost-effective than the Moments location. If your budget is limited, you can run more on the public account location and put more converted materials into the Moments location. Pull out the game’s previous data from various platforms and select cities with good results to display.

If you are running Android, the news and video positions originally pushed by Zhihui have had good results. Now after the merger, if you don't use App Store , it is not recommended to spend budget on Guangdiantong and WeChat mp.

Recommended ★★ Cost ★★ ROI ★☆

The quality of games on headlines varies from company to company. I don’t know if it’s affected by strategy, but the scale is increasing, but the quality gap between the top and bottom traffic is widening.

The account logic of Toutiao and Facebook is very similar, and the programming is also relatively mature. Since it is a machine algorithm, the account must rely on certain advertising data support. Pay more attention to the changes in click-through rate and e CPM . A click-through rate of 0.8 is a hurdle in Toutiao. If a new plan is activated, don’t immediately adjust the budget to n nines.

The budget will determine the exposure range, but if the plan itself is unable to achieve the target, the system will easily exceed the determined range. Often, as soon as a plan is activated, the budget is expanded immediately, resulting in no activity. If the initial budget is 1k, you can gradually increase to 1k, 5k, 10k, 10w, and 50w.

In terms of direction, iOS is relatively single, but don’t set it too narrow. It will be relatively easy to get volume in the initial stage if the estimated coverage reaches more than 20 million. Try to use certain functions as little as possible or not at all (user first activation time, programmatic creativity, etc.); Android's user base is much larger, and you can expand several population groups like Guangdiantong, and you can also make some choices on the models. Huawei and Xiaomi users still have good paying capabilities.

In terms of position, it is recommended to consider the attributes of the game itself. The game quality of jokes will be better than ordinary information flow , the gif effect is good, and the copy can be a little dirty to attract users. Users of new positions are relatively young. If most of your players are 18-25 years old, you can try more.

If the bidding quality has always been unsatisfactory, it is recommended to transfer part of the budget to try the package of jokes. After all, the headlines are now covered by package, and it is common to bid high but not get the quantity, especially on iOS.

Recommended ★★★ Cost ☆ ROI ★★★

The keyword bidding advertising of the search engine Google is called AdWords. When running domestic channels through overseas channels , the quality of Google 's Android is still better than that of iOS. Compared with various domestic platforms, the old version has mature account logic, flexible data display, and automatic adjustment of bidding budget, and there are still many ways to play.

As for Android, since the product I came into contact with was not available on Google Play, I had to abandon the UAC position and switch to display advertising , and the effect was quite ideal. Although this type of traffic source, such as an alliance , is of lower quality than the average level, it has low costs and high payment rates, allowing the ROI line to be pulled to a very high value in the short term.

In terms of direction, the idea is to mainly acquire target users . For example, I have a budget of 1k and need to acquire 1k users and 2k paying users in intervals. Then you can exclude low-version Android systems and low-priced models, pull out several time periods with higher historical payment rates for the game, give them high prices, and use the elimination method as the targeting method. Judging from previous results, the effect on mobile devices is better than that on tablet devices, the display effect of apps is better than that of web pages, and the effects of different games vary. Friends who play games can also try to optimize.

In terms of position, the overall effects of static images and gif images are good. It is recommended to conduct a/b testing to optimize based on the payment level of a single plan. The sizes of display ads, 300×250, 300×600, mobile banner, and 1200×628 are the positions that I have tested before and have shown good results. You can try them out together.

Recommended ★★ Cost ★★ ROI ★★

I mention these two together because the scale of the materials in the past was shockingly large, and the author's home happens to have a program for cultivating officials, which contains some materials about beautiful women, so obscene that the author can hardly bear to watch it.

The difference in account logic will not be too big. The main CPM method is to control the budget in the early stage. In the past, iQiyi's performance in the full-column movie column was quite ideal. It often costs several hundred at the beginning without activation, but it will be much better after consumption. For the type of games I have, the quality can still support the higher cost in the later stage.

However, judging from recent developments, strict control over material review and the serious degree of user washes have led to increasingly unsatisfactory platform data. The author suggests that if you encounter similar situations, you should switch to other channels to replenish the volume as soon as possible and do not rely too much on a single channel.

1. Pay attention to details

In terms of budget control, I am accustomed to making adjustments in a step-by-step manner. Increasing the budget means an increase in the number of people exposed. Increasing it too much in a short period of time will make user acquisition inaccurate, which is also a problem that is often considered during the delivery process.

Directionally, pay more attention to each option, especially Android (which has a larger user base). Version restrictions, model selection, application of population packages, etc. are all aimed at narrowing and refining the population. From the user's perspective, if we think more about what type of target users we need, it will not be difficult to set it up.

2. Collect more data

The figure below is a small model that I often use during the testing period (with errors in the data). Here I have picked out some situations of channel collection after the 11th, 12th, and 13th days from the start of the test (it can be understood as the multiple increase in the collection rate after the 11th, 12th, and 13th days from the start of the test compared to the 1st day). It will be much more convenient to make adjustments based on this.

It is not difficult to see that with the gradual increase in the budget, the recovery curve is still accumulating and rising, and LTV7 and 30 days are gradually increasing. At this time, we can continue to expand the budget and try. (LTV7,30: average payment of newly added equipment 7 or 30 days after the date of addition within the selected date range).

3. The material/ landing page is very important

A good set of materials/landing pages can reduce many troubles in optimization. I won’t embarrass myself here, after all, there are a lot of good materials and information shared on Aiqijun’s official account. It is worth mentioning that the materials that I often think are insignificant can perform well on the platform. This is one of the reasons why more planned tests are needed. After all, users have different preferences and tastes.

Just kidding, I used to play 8-10 accounts at the same time, constantly changing materials every day, doing data statistics and analysis regularly. Sometimes the new materials could not be updated, so I just made do with being a half-artist. Even if you keep yourself so busy that you forget to rest, the monthly expenditure is only a few million. This shows that many hands make light work, and the impact of a small team is far greater than that of a single person.

Along the way, the budget has slowly increased, but the accounts on hand have become smaller, and the artists can also produce materials in batches. Although the workload is less, the author still plays with the account from time to time. On the one hand, it allows him to constantly be exposed to market trends. On the other hand, as I said at the beginning, don’t let yourself be impetuous and don’t let yourself lose your value.

Consider issues more from the user's perspective. Customers are God, and a good product cannot be separated from players. In terms of optimization, you can cooperate more with operations , and the game's most attractive gameplay and best-selling event content can be incorporated into the materials. When you complain about unsatisfactory promotion results, have you ever considered the problem that the materials are misleading users and fail to reflect the characteristics of the game?

Faced with today's fast-food-like information flow, the author believes that the value of marketing and promotion is still relatively large. Often a 60-point product + 40-point packaging can beat a 90-point masterpiece. I often get high-scoring games recommended by friends on the Steam and PS platforms. These games, which are spread through word-of-mouth marketing, are often extremely low in commercialization. While bringing the gaming experience, I can't help but sigh that if a product wants to gain a foothold in the market, a mature assembly line is indispensable, from project to promotion, operation to maintenance, market research to data analysis . People are always annoyed by the overwhelming number of mobile game advertisements nowadays, but they don’t realize that this is just the tip of the iceberg of products.

Faced with the impact of Tencent and NetEase on mobile games , we have felt that the situation is becoming increasingly serious in the past two years. Gradually outsourcing packages to keep each other warm and achieve win-win cooperation may be the better choice at the moment.

at last!

I would like to thank my friends for their suggestions and help on this article. No matter they are new friends or industry experts, I hope to have the opportunity to share and consult with you so that optimization can become a warm job.

Source: Wu Yu