A must-read for APP promotion, complete promotion data analysis in 3 steps!

When I was reporting business dynamics to the bosses in the advertising department of an Internet company, I accumulated some small experiences, which I would like to share with you today. It is for newcomers, but experienced people may feel free to skip this.

At that time, the business of my department was the advertising platform business, and email was a better communication tool to inform bosses of business progress. Therefore, reporting important business progress to the bosses and monitoring changes in core indicators became one of my important job responsibilities.

1. Determine core indicators and decompose them

For the boss, for the advertising department, generating revenue is of course the top priority, so the consumption indicator cannot be reduced. Consumption in the advertising industry is also called advertising turnover, which refers to the amount of consumption by advertisers . If there is no recharge rebate or consumption rebate, consumption = advertiser's expenditure (cost) = company's business income . For the advertising industry, the secondary indicators that determine the core indicator of consumption can be divided into the following variable indicators:

Advertising consumption = PV CPM/1000 = Ad clicks CPC = PV CTR CPC

PV refers to the number of ad displays or ad exposure , which is how many times the ad has been seen by users in total; CPM is the cost per thousand impressions, which means how much money the advertiser needs to pay us (the advertising platform) if he lets users see the ad 1,000 times. For us, it corresponds to how much money we can make by displaying the ad 1,000 times; CPC is the cost per click, which is how much money the advertiser needs to pay us for one click and how much revenue we can get; CTR is the click-through rate of the ad, which is the probability of a user clicking on the ad when he sees it. For example, if the ad is displayed 1,000 times but the user only clicks on it twice, then the ad click-through rate is 0.2%.

By breaking down the indicators, you will know what you should report to your bosses, and you will also know how departments divide the work and develop products and operations based on these indicators. To increase the department's revenue, one way is to increase exposure. We can persuade the company to add more advertising space on the product. We can also increase revenue by increasing user clicks, but clicks are only an intermediate indicator. To increase user clicks, one way is to increase exposure.

Another key factor is the click-through rate of ads. To increase the click-through rate of ads, the technical department needs to improve technical targeting or introduce better-quality advertising materials . We can also try to increase the CPC of our ads . Since we use RTB bidding ads, one way to increase the CPC is to increase the number of advertisers and let them intensify competition.

In summary, there are two core factors for the advertising business department to achieve its revenue targets: one is traffic , and the other is the efficiency of monetizing traffic. The indicator corresponding to traffic is ad exposure , the indicator corresponding to monetization efficiency is CPM, and the next-level indicators that affect CPM are CTR and CPC.

2. Daily reporting of business progress, with year-on-year and month-on-month analysis being the most basic

When reporting business to your boss on a daily basis, year-on-year and month-on-month analysis is a basic quality. Workers have to go to work on weekdays and students have to go to school, which forms the most basic workday efficiency of Internet products.

Therefore, weekly year-on-year comparative analysis is the most basic quality. At the same time, the situation is changing with each passing day. A new wealthy advertiser may be added today, which will suddenly drive changes in the company's revenue, so the daily year-on-year comparison is also particularly critical.

When analyzing the year-on-year and day-on-day comparisons, it is necessary to consider both the increase and the growth rate . The increase analysis looks at the change in absolute value , while the growth rate mainly looks at the degree of increase or decrease . After all, sometimes the increase is large, but the growth rate is actually not large, so it is not worth making a fuss about.

For example, if a person who runs a small noodle shop loses 1,000 yuan in income today, this is a big deal because his usual turnover is only a few thousand yuan. But this 1,000 yuan is just a negligible fluctuation in the growth rate for a company that runs a supermarket.

To sum up, a basic table of daily reports is here:

As shown above, on January 1, 2018, the company's revenue grew well, and the boss asked you what caused it. You only need to look at the table above to know that compared with the 31st of last year, the main reason for the increase in advertising revenue is the increase in exposure . While the click-through rate has not changed much, the number of clicks has also increased, and the prices offered by advertisers have also increased.

In order to eliminate the impact of cyclical factors, you also took a look at the year-on-year growth, and the conclusion was roughly similar. The increase in exposure and cost per click was the main reason for the revenue growth, and both traffic and traffic monetization efficiency improved.

3. We still need to get to the bottom of things and peel the onion to identify the specific reasons

If you simply tell your boss that increased exposure and advertiser price increases are the main reasons for revenue growth, that's not enough. You need to understand why the exposure has increased? Where is the increase? Why did advertisers raise prices? Which advertiser proposed the price? Is this a common behavior among advertisers or a temporary behavior of a particular advertiser?

So at this time you need to further break down the business and keep drilling down like peeling an onion.

First, let’s take a look at why the traffic exposure has increased. At this time, you need to know the traffic sources of your advertising platform . At that time, we used media platforms to distinguish these traffic sources. For example, like Tencent, we have QQ Space, QQ, Tencent.com, App Store , WeChat and other media where we can sell advertisements. We can use a similar approach to analyze changes in exposure of these media.

As shown in the figure below, you need to classify these media and do a year-on-year and month-on-month analysis, so you can identify QQ and WeChat as the main media that led to the increase in exposure.

But the story doesn't end here, you need to continue peeling the onion. As the song goes:

If you are willing to peel off my heart layer by layer

You will find that you will be surprised

You are the most depressing to me

The Deepest Secret

Only in this way can the truth be discovered.

At that time, the department already had reports related to advertising positions. At this time, you picked out the exposures of hundreds of advertising positions and did a date comparison analysis of the exposure volume. At the same time, for convenience, you can also add two columns next to it, one for the percentage of month-on-month increase, and the other for the percentage of year-on-year increase. That is, you divide the increase of each advertising position by the overall increase, so as to know how much this increase contributes to the change.

It should be noted that the percentage of increase can be positive or negative, which means that some ad positions make a positive contribution to exposure, but at the same time, the decrease in exposure of some ad positions offsets this growth to a certain extent.

At this point, when you peel to this position of the onion, you are closer to the core of the traffic. At this time, as a business analyst, you feel it is necessary to find the partner in charge of traffic connection or the media partner to ask the reason for the change in advertising exposure, whether it is a sudden increase in user traffic, or they have made some strategic adjustments.

Don’t forget, you still have a question to explain, why CPC has also increased

If CPC suddenly rises in a short period of time, and if the data is correct, it is usually because a wealthy sponsor has come out to grab traffic at a high price. For example, was it Double 11 yesterday, and e-commerce advertisers were grabbing traffic at all costs, or was it because Tencent’s chicken-eating game was finally launched and they were promoting it vigorously?

At this time, what you need to do is the same as analyzing the ad positions. Export the report of the advertiser dimension for comparative analysis. However, it should be noted that when analyzing which advertiser caused the CPC change, you cannot only look at the CPC indicator. You need to export the core indicators such as consumption, exposure, and CPC of each advertisement and make a comparison. After all, if we only look at the absolute increase in advertiser CPC without looking at the proportion of other indicators such as the corresponding advertiser's consumption, it would be tragic to jump to conclusions.

For example, the price per click of advertiser A is 100 yuan today, and he consumes 10,000 yuan. His price per click was 1 yuan yesterday, and he consumed 500 yuan. The price per click of advertiser B is 2 yuan today, and he consumes 100,000 yuan. His price per click was 1 yuan yesterday, and he consumed 60,000 yuan. Which of these two is the reason for the increase in CPC? I believe you can reach a conclusion through careful analysis.

When it is determined that a certain advertiser is the reason for the increase in CPC, you need to find relevant colleagues who are connected to the advertiser to understand the reasons for the advertiser's aggressive advertising, see what the results are, and what the follow-up plans are.

To sum up, it is that simple to make a daily email report to your boss. The main thing is to understand the business and know how to break down business indicators and segment the business , horizontally or vertically. Horizontally, look at the components, such as different media and different advertisers; vertically, look at the dependent variables that lead to changes in core indicators, one link at a time, such as exposure, click-through rate, and cost per click. Analyze the overall situation to see which indicator affects the change in revenue; or use the comparison method to carefully compare the differences between two time nodes.

The author of this article is @昏析小记 and it is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services Advertising platform Longyou Century