A comprehensive inventory of Toutiao products and practical sharing of strategy optimization!

In recent years, Toutiao has developed rapidly, and many of its products have become a battleground for advertisers. As an information flow optimizer, you may already have a budget of millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions. But do you really know Toutiao well enough?

Last week, I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a promotion salon at Toutiao’s headquarters. The speaker summarized Toutiao’s current advertising status over the past two years and also revealed some of Toutiao’s key products and projects this year.

After the meeting, looking at the two pages of densely packed notes on the key points of the meeting, I suddenly realized that with the continuous iteration of Toutiao products and the launch of new products, there are still many things I need to learn and pay attention to. I took a deep breath and decided to summarize the placement of Toutiao ads...

Today we will re-understand the placement of Toutiao advertisements from two perspectives: Toutiao product inventory and strategy optimization. We hope it will be helpful to everyone.

1. Inventory of Toutiao products

As the saying goes, knowing yourself and knowing your enemy, you can fight a hundred battles without defeat; before launching an ad, we must fully understand the channel product characteristics , channel user attributes , and ad style , so that we can launch an ad in a targeted manner.

Toutiao's delivery management platform has been officially renamed "ByteDance", which integrates the delivery resources of Toutiao, Douyin, Huoshan Video, Xigua Video, and Pangolin. Advertisers can manage their advertisements in one stop and improve the efficiency of advertising.

2. User attributes of Toutiao products

As can be seen from the above figure, Toutiao and Volcano Video have a relatively large proportion of male users; Douyin Short Video and Xigua Video have a balanced ratio of male and female users. In addition, the age of users of Toutiao products is still relatively young, mainly middle-aged and young people. The geographical distribution is mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, with users expanding to third-tier cities and below.

One thing that needs to be mentioned separately is Pangolin. Since its essence is affiliate advertising, its user portrait is difficult to obtain. However, from the information currently available, it is known that it has more than 1,000 vertical media resources and more than 10 well-known domestic and foreign manufacturers, with more than 300 million daily active users. The most important thing is that according to Toutiao, the overlap between Pangolin and ByteDance’s daily active users is less than 20%, which may be a good choice for advertisers.

3. Detailed explanation of advertising styles

Since there are many Toutiao products, each with different advertising positions and formats, I will not explain them in detail here, but will give you an overview diagram that I have compiled. (If you have any questions about a resource or display location, you can download the detailed content through the link below the picture for interpretation)

(Link: https://pan.baidu.com/s/1knYr0o8QmPGclkcQr1FZuA Extraction code: nug7)

2. Strategy Optimization

We can divide a complete delivery process into the following nodes: traffic (resource position) → creativity → landing → destination (App/mini program/e-commerce store, etc.) → conversion (meeting user needs/monetization) → CRM.

Among them, traffic (resource position) has been introduced in detail above. You can choose based on your own product characteristics and the user attributes of the resource party.

There are also corresponding optimization tools in the background of Bytedance for creatives and landing pages; the creative copywriting part can be optimized through the " system recommended title " and " creative inspiration " at the advertising creative level, and the landing page can be built by selecting high-quality templates through " Orange Website Builder " or customized.

CRM, or customer relationship management, can be achieved through Toutiao's Yuntu DMP ; and Yuntu DMP provides multi-dimensional population tags and industry population packages. I recommend everyone to use it, you will be surprised.

Pay attention! The above content is just an introduction, the following content is the key point...

In the actual delivery process, our common goal is to optimize conversion costs. To achieve this goal, we will select high-quality media traffic and further screen the traffic through multiple redirections. We will also optimize advertising creatives to reduce CPC by increasing CTR. At the same time, we will also select landing pages with low bounce rates and high triggering rates through landing page AB testing.

but! In addition to these basic optimization measures, are there any "revolutionary" optimization strategies? !

Of course!

The first one: satisfying user needs in the native environment (no bounce, complete conversion within the same scene)

For example, let’s say I want to buy a mobile phone. One day when I was browsing Douyin, I saw an advertisement for a mobile phone brand. I clicked on the advertisement and entered the product details page of that brand. After a round of screening, I selected a certain model and completed the purchase by paying directly on Douyin.

In this form, users do not need to jump from one App to another. For users, it saves traffic and time, and for advertisers, it reduces the loss of target users. According to Toutiao, there have been successful internal testing cases among e-commerce users; and the financial industry is also conducting tests, with the goal of completing loan issuance or card approval directly within Toutiao products.

The second method: optimize conversion goals through OCPM smart bidding! (Ensure traffic volume and user quality, and pay only when conversion occurs)

Compared with the first method, OCPM’s delivery method is already very mature and its effect has been recognized by many parties. When it comes to OCPM we must understand conversion tracking, which is the implementation method of OCPM.

Toutiao currently supports the following forms of conversion tracking, and advertisers in different industries can choose according to their promotional business.

This time we will focus on "effective customer acquisition" and "deep conversion". Since the optimization targets of these two delivery methods are paying users, the ROI of advertising can be greatly improved under this delivery model. (By the way, "effective customer acquisition" is Toutiao's key focus this year)

In order to better explain and distinguish these two forms, let us take the conversion path of promoting paid apps as an example.

【Effective customer acquisition】

User sees the ad → clicks on the ad → form registration page → App download page → download and activate the App → pay within the App → advertising billing

【Deep Conversion】

User sees the ad → clicks on the ad → App download page → downloads and activates the App → pays within the App → advertising is charged

By comparing the conversion paths, it can be seen that both use "user payment within the App" as the node for advertising billing. At the same time, there are more conversion paths for effective customer acquisition, so the users acquired are more accurate. Of course, the corresponding OCPM bid needs to be higher.

There are two very obvious advantages of these two delivery methods:

(1) Efficient and accurate: You don’t need to spend a lot of time researching how to accurately target. Both of these delivery modes use paying users as model data, so once the model is running smoothly, the effect of the delivery will definitely not be bad.

(2) Stable traffic: Since the conversion path is long, the OCPM bid on the front end will inevitably be higher. According to actual tests, these two forms of ecpm are more than 20% higher than other methods, which means that the media party will gain more benefits. Similarly, the traffic we get will be more and of higher quality.

The figure below is a test of effective customer acquisition and deep conversion results that I started in January 2019. It can be seen that over time, the effects of these two delivery methods have begun to improve significantly as their budget share increases.

In summary, it is recommended that advertisers who have high consumption KPIs and monetization pressure, as well as certain data capabilities, adopt these two methods for key delivery and optimization.

3. Uncovering the effects of new products

In the first quarter of 2019, Toutiao launched two popular advertising products: Toutiao search ads and app-based bidding. The author was very lucky to get the internal test qualification, and now I will share the test results with you.

1. Toutiao search ads

(1) Basic introduction:

Implementation scenario: The construction of Toutiao search ads can be completed in the background of the massive engine delivery

Bidding method: Bid by click (buy word bid); Bid by conversion (targeted by word, unified bid)

Three billing methods: click, impression, conversion

Creative form: large picture, small picture, group picture, video

Matching method: phrase match, broad match

(2) Advertising scenarios

(3) Test data

Data shows that the activation cost of search ads has dropped by 12% and the ROI has increased by 7%. However, due to the limitations on the ad triggering format, the daily consumption of search ads is relatively low. With the same bid, the cost of search advertising is only 10% of that of information flow advertising.

2. Bid by App

This feature allows advertisers to place multiple media resources simultaneously in one advertising plan and adjust bids at any time based on back-end performance to optimize back-end ROI.

Test data:

Data shows that the activation cost of the bidding test based on different apps is the same as that of the overall information flow, and the ROI has increased by 36%; and due to the simultaneous delivery of multiple resources, the average daily expenditure is quite considerable.

After introducing the bidding by app, what do you think of?

right! Bidding by app can be combined with the effective customer acquisition and deep conversion introduced above to maximize the scale and effect of delivery!

Well, the above is all the content shared this time about Toutiao advertising. I hope it will be helpful to you.

Final Thoughts

As optimizers, we not only need to have sufficient understanding of channel resources and adjust the delivery strategy according to the situation at all times, but also have a keen sense of smell; we must seize the opportunity and occupy an advantageous position as soon as the bonus appears.

Author: Tong Jianyang

This article is contributed by the author. If you wish to reprint it, please contact the original author.