Industry promotion is undergoing transformation: 30% of companies that buy traffic no longer do so!

Let’s first talk about the current status and trends of the buying volume industry:

The figure below lists the average CPA user acquisition cost from January to May. The overall trend is still on the rise. The payback period for top high-quality products is basically more than 3 months. How many companies have a payback period of more than half a year and are still gritting their teeth to buy volume? Please raise your hands!

As we all know, Guangzhou has become a concentration area for cost-effective volume purchase and distribution. This time, we also visited several companies whose monthly volume purchase and distribution turnover is around 100 million. The products they mainly distribute are still fairy-tale and legendary products. The team size is 300 or even more than 500 people. Basically, half of the staff is responsible for advertising and the other half is responsible for guilds. Although they get off work after 12 o'clock every day and are still looking for products everywhere, it seems that every company is full of confidence.

From an industry perspective, without considering scale, 30% of the companies that engaged in buying volume last year have now withdrawn from the buying volume business. Nearly half of the companies that have withdrawn from the buying volume business do not have products with particularly good data that are suitable for buying volume. Because the cost is too high and there is a high degree of overlap in product types, it is difficult for products that acquire customers through the top buying volume channels to make a profit.

Even some products that were on the radar last year have significantly reduced their budgets for purchasing traffic this year. In addition, some company products are stuck with version numbers and Apple's review. Everyone generally feels that it is difficult to apply for version numbers now, and Apple has also increased the intensity of code and manual review. In this regard, many CPs of vest packages have to rewrite the code, and dozens of sets of novice guide programs and materials have to be written to cope with the review.

In addition, we have to mention that among the 30% of companies that withdrew from the ranks of buying volume, more than half of the companies either went bankrupt or cut their buying volume and distribution teams and transformed and stopped playing. To borrow the words of Grandma Duan, vice president of Yiwan, buying volume and distribution is no longer a red ocean but a sea of ​​fire. Companies that are still in the sea of ​​fire will definitely not survive if they have not developed a keen eye. If you don’t have the skills but only have money, you’d better not jump into the fire pit, because you will be burned out in minutes before you can react (except for bosses who are super rich and willful in buying, buying and buying).

Tencent, NetEase and other big companies not only rely on their own traffic and users, but have also joined the army of buying traffic. It is said that Tencent has set itself a small goal to capture more than 70% of China's mobile game distribution market by 2020. I don't know if NetEase thinks so too. Anyway, many CPs now think that it is absolutely right to give good products directly to Tencent and NetEase.

In addition to NetEase and Tencent, Alibaba and 360 also entered the market in a high-profile manner this year. Top media such as Toutiao are also testing the waters for mobile game distribution and joint operations . Each region including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen , Chengdu, Xiamen and Wuhan has also subtly formed its own factions and labels, and the trend of the strong getting stronger has become increasingly obvious.

Are you still posting pictures in the information flow ? You are out, right? If the video team hasn’t been established yet, can’t the guys and girls in the company’s advertising team record short videos for Douyin ? Don’t ever tell others that you’re the one who buys traffic to distribute the products. Do you really think that those who are doing well are all self-taught? After a while, I found that poverty limited my imagination. Now, the successful buying teams have not only evolved the ability to not need to sleep,

They also have the ability to capture new physical objects and new traffic, and they get to try it out first. Most of them invest heavily in high-quality video production, and there are also creative teams specially established to make short videos. Because the quality of converted users and the ability to attract traffic are very good, not only the buying team, but even the business ladies use the Douyin address when introducing themselves.

I believe that you can relate to the above situations more than I do. Here is a sharing from the data perspective:

1. First, let’s look at the data trend of “big clicks”.

We optimized the monitoring algorithm and used big data across the entire network (in fact, the most effective thing was our team’s earnest and sincere communication with customers and the warnings we gave to cheating advertising platforms [begging for mercy]). After half a year of hard work by our team, we have finally seen a significant reduction in the problem of “big clicks”! We feel a great sense of accomplishment in this work. Let's take a look:

By May, the problems of using "big clicks" to collide with the database and brush attribution had reached the same level as in March 2017, and the number of clicks was one-tenth of that in December last year. This not only saved a lot of server resources (increased revenue), but we were also very happy to see a reduction in cheating. Now that we understood the ins and outs, advertising platforms began to think about how to do business in the long run. Of course, there are still some companies that are determined to protect the interests of "big clicks". Well, I won't say more about that. I'm going to talk to APP companies about their marketing. APP companies that buy traffic are also troubled by problems such as "big clicks" fleecing and device cheating.

2. Next, look at the trend of click-to-activation rate (C VR )

The activation rate is the amount of activations divided by the amount of ad clicks. So if the number of clicks decreases but the amount of activations remains the same, the activation rate will definitely increase. The activation rate data in May also exceeded 0.50%, reaching the level of February last year.

In addition to looking at the activation rate data of the entire network, let's look at the average activation rate of the top information flow media ( Toutiao , TSA, Baidu, UC Toutiao , iQiyi , Weibo Fans Tong is not included in the table because the data reported includes data reported within three seconds of video playback, resulting in a low activation rate). From the data, we can see that the average device activation rates of Toutiao, Tencent, Baidu and UC Toutiao are comparable, all between 2-4%. Among them, the information flow advertising conversion rates of Toutiao and UC Toutiao are relatively high, as shown below:

3. Activation volume trend

Except for the Chinese New Year in February, the number of device activations each month has been on the rise, which is also one of the main factors for the increase in the average activation rate of the entire network. The number of newly activated devices in the entire network each month is close to 40 million.

4. Product launch trends

As several categories cannot be placed in major media and channels this year, and many companies have stopped or reduced their placements, the trend of the total number of products placed has declined for the first time in the past two years, from 4,813 products in December last year to 4,312 in May, as shown in the figure:

5. Trend of average number of users acquired by a single product

From the perspective of analyzing trends, I prefer to look at two data points. One is how many new users the top products can gain each month, and the other is the overall trend of the average monthly number of users acquired by a single product.

Because this data can represent a data dimension of the survival status of the entire buying volume distribution industry, compared with November and December last year, the number of users acquired by a single product in May this year increased by 15.15%, and also returned to the same period level in May last year. It should be noted that the number of users acquired by a single product was declining throughout the year last year. Therefore, it shows that the number of products purchased for volume has decreased, and for the products that are still purchasing volume, the user acquisition ability has been enhanced. The data is shown in the figure below:

6. Android vs iOS trends

Compared with December last year, the share of purchased games on Android has increased slightly from 33.1% to 34%. Purchased games are still mainly sold on the iOS platform. The data is shown in the figure:

7. Top 30 advertising platforms

The screening criteria are that the activation rate from click to activation is between 1% and 15%, and the top 30 are sorted by activation volume in May. At the same time, the advertising platforms that have been connected with TrackingIO of Reyun are as follows for reference:

The author of this article @More一Than一Data was compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games