Daniel Wu: How to allocate the budget for information flow advertising? Nick Cheung: Just do it without any limit!

In addition, I also know a broadband installer named "G-Dragon". Do you believe it?

Besides, Nick Cheung is already working on Toutiao’s information flow , so how long is Daniel Wu far behind?

Okay, let’s get to the point!

Today, we will use this information flow advertisement by Nick Cheung to talk about the budget allocation of Toutiao accounts~

Friends who are familiar with Toutiao’s advertising platform may have noticed that at the end of last year, the original “average delivery” was renamed “standard delivery”. Soon after, “standard delivery” completely replaced “accelerated delivery” as the platform’s default recommended option, and even the word [recommended] was added to the copy .

Why do we use standard delivery as the platform's default recommended delivery method?

What are the correct ways to use standard delivery?

As the product manager responsible for this part of the product change, I will share with you some of our thoughts on budget allocation and delivery effectiveness behind this series of changes.

◆ 00 1 ◆

1. Advertising competitiveness (creativity, bidding and targeting, etc.) determines whether the plan can be consumed and the upper limit of consumption.

2. The size of the budget setting and the competitiveness of the advertisement jointly determine the actual consumption.

3. When competitiveness is sufficient to spend all the budget set by the advertiser, the budget allocation method determines how we allocate the budget, that is, the speed of consumption, which usually leads to obvious differences in the delivery effect.

At this stage, we can only optimize the creativity, targeting and bidding to improve the competitiveness of advertising.

◆ 002 ◆

Standard delivery: It is committed to spending the budget evenly throughout the entire delivery cycle. The delivery system will intelligently allocate budgets and adjust bids according to the bidding environment to achieve the lowest cost delivery effect.

That is, to obtain the most optimization goals (impressions, clicks or conversions ) under the same budget. In most cases, we recommend choosing this budget allocation mode.

Accelerated delivery: Spend the budget as quickly as possible, which usually results in unpredictable budget spending speed.

Especially when advertisers do not have a good understanding of the competitiveness of their advertisements, it is easy to cause situations where they cannot deliver the advertisements or the advertisements are consumed too quickly, and at the same time the cost of delivery is not the lowest.

However, in some promotional needs with a strong timeliness, it is still necessary to choose accelerated delivery.

Let’s take a specific example to illustrate the difference between standard delivery and accelerated delivery.

Suppose we have a need to promote an app, and decide to use installation completion as the optimization goal. The daily budget is set to 10 yuan (just for example, the actual platform currently has a minimum budget of 100 yuan), and the target cost is 5 yuan. Consider the following scenario:

Standard delivery will consume the budget relatively evenly throughout the day, and while ensuring that the budget can be fully spent, it will make full use of changes in the competitive environment to bring in as many conversions as possible.

In this example, the standard delivery selected the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th and 8th conversions that met the cost, and the final cost was also 2+3+1+1+3 = 10 yuan, but the average conversion cost was only 10/5 = 2 yuan.

It can be seen that if the budget can be spent, the average conversion cost of standard delivery will be significantly lower than that of accelerated delivery; and through the previous introduction, everyone also knows that if the budget cannot be spent, the delivery effects of standard delivery and accelerated delivery are equivalent.

Therefore, for advertisers who pursue delivery results, standard delivery is almost always better than accelerated delivery. This is why we use standard delivery as the default budget allocation method on the platform.

The only exception is the timeliness mentioned earlier. In the above example, we can see that although the standard delivery spent the budget and obtained more conversions, it took 8 conversions to complete the budget, while the accelerated delivery only needed 3 conversions to complete the budget. Therefore, our platform still retains the accelerated delivery.

In other words, it is a waste of advertisers' budgets, just like when we buy something, we have to compare prices from three stores to choose the most affordable product.

But it is easier said than done. If you just wait and don’t take action immediately, it will not work. After all, no one knows whether there will be cheaper traffic in the future.

◆ 00 3 ◆

Clarification: This misunderstanding is very representative and quite confusing, because in actual operation, when switching from standard delivery to accelerated delivery, consumption will indeed increase, but this does not mean that accelerated delivery will consume more.

Because as we mentioned above, the actual amount consumed during the delivery cycle depends only on the competitiveness of the advertisement and the budget setting.

So how does the phenomenon of faster consumption occur? In fact, you can see from the example above that this is because accelerated delivery does not "shop around", so the same budget may be spent before the afternoon for accelerated delivery, while standard delivery may not be spent until the evening.

If our delivery personnel do not understand the reasoning behind it, they may easily mistakenly believe that accelerated delivery has traffic or strategic advantages, and then waste some high-quality traffic without knowing it.

Misunderstanding 2: I set a budget of 100 yuan, but it took me a day to spend it all. The traffic of Toutiao is not as large as advertised.

Clarification: This misunderstanding usually comes from some advertisers who have just joined Toutiao this year. Because standard delivery is currently the platform’s default delivery method and is hidden relatively deeply, advertisers may not have noticed it.

After understanding the goal of standard delivery, I believe everyone will understand that the faster you spend, the more good "scenery" you may miss. So as long as the advertising competitiveness is enough to consume the budget, whether the budget is 1 million or 100,000, it will be spent relatively evenly within a day.

Misunderstanding 3: I use oCPC, set the budget to 10,000 yuan, and the target cost to 50 yuan. Why is the actual cost only 35 yuan? Is there something wrong with Toutiao’s advertising delivery system? And even after I increased the budget, the costs continued to go up?

Clarification: In short, as long as you use standard delivery, we will always find the conversion with the lowest average cost for you while spending your current budget.

This is often related to advertising competitiveness and budget. The average cost of conversions found with a small budget is definitely lower than that with a large budget, because for advertising and anything else, there is always a small amount of high-quality traffic.

But even if the actual cost has gone up, it is still the lowest average cost when the budget is spent relatively evenly.

Since standard delivery usually uses up all of its budget in the evening, frequent adjustments within a day will affect the optimization of the system and will also affect advertisers' judgment of the program's running volume.

When you are not sure at the beginning, you can set a smaller budget. After the plan is optimized and stabilized, you can gradually increase the budget.

2. Set an acceptable maximum target cost.

This is usually related to the value of the conversion to the advertiser, and can also be adjusted gradually based on budget requirements.

3. Choose 24-hour delivery whenever possible.

Unless there is a clear service time limit, we do not recommend that you use scheduling, because as we mentioned above, full exploration can ensure that the cost is optimal when the budget is spent. Otherwise, either the budget cannot be spent or the cost is too high.

4. Optimize advertising competitiveness within the day and adjust the budget on a daily basis.

When advertising is not competitive enough, the setting of budget and budget allocation method is actually not very meaningful. Therefore, only when the competitiveness is strong enough and the volume can be achieved, it makes sense for us to observe budget expenditure and cost.

When the ad is competitive enough, observe the budget expenditure and actual cost after one day of running, and adjust the budget and bid accordingly.

5. If the budget of the previous day has not been spent, optimize advertising competitiveness; if the budget of the previous day has been spent, but the actual cost is significantly lower than the target cost, increase the budget; if the budget of the previous day has been spent, but the actual cost is significantly higher than the target cost, optimize the creativity and landing page .

If the actual cost is lower than the target cost, it usually means that there is still a lot of traffic that meets the cost requirements and we can get it, but we did not get it due to budget constraints. What we need to do at this time is to increase the budget until the actual cost is close to the target.

6. Last but not least, be patient.

This is more of a psychological requirement, because standard delivery requires exploring traffic in more time periods, but we believe that the rewards of patience are huge.