[Promotion] Future applications: No matter how fancy your H5 is, what’s the use if there is no traffic?

Zeno once proposed: Human knowledge is like a circle. What is inside the circle is known, and what is outside the circle is unknown. The more you know, the more you don’t know.

As the future application of a well-known H5 creative customization brand, after completing the 100th H5 work, the whole team fell into deep anxiety. We have made a lot of H5 for our clients, our circle is getting bigger and bigger, our understanding of mobile marketing has become deeper, but the more we do, the more panicked we feel.

Because we found

H5 traffic is decreasing

The traffic of H5 that relies on natural dissemination is declining, and the freshness and forwarding motivation of users in the circle of friends for H5 are weakening.

However, what is even more frustrating is the H5 page traffic distribution map for a certain region during the "Double 11" period (11.10-11.16) that we obtained from the operator :

It was found that the top five domain names in terms of traffic are: JD.com, Didi, Sina Weibo , WeChat, 1 Yuan Cloud Shopping, and QQ Space.

And these are not marketing H5s!

Analysis summary:

1. They all have WeChat entrances;

2. The content is powerful and users actively share it;

3. Large user base

Although Alibaba, a major active customer during Double Eleven , is not in the H5 communication map based on WeChat, this statistical data will lose some reference value, which is a bit regrettable. But today we are not going to talk about Tencent and Alibaba, nor about which tool platform has a better prospect, but we want to think about a question with you:

If we are not in any of the BAT systems, we cannot enjoy the traffic dividend. There is a century-old problem: Now that H5 is ready, where does the traffic come from?

With this question in mind, I recently discussed various issues with market leaders in the industry. The following is their real feedback, which more or less reflects the current situation:

☞ Digital Marketing Manager of a large B2B brand

"We usually use H5 to tell stories on self-media channels, and H5 QR codes are also printed on product manuals, so users can share product information and download electronic versions. Content marketing is still very important, and H5 is just one of the technical means." "Another part of customized H5 is mainly produced by mobile advertising agencies, because they have been engaged in mobile advertising for a long time, have rich experience, know the usage habits of mobile terminals, and understand technology. A large part of our H5 is also mainly used as advertising landing, which is better than the simple extension of print advertising."

"The main mobile advertising channels now are video, APP alliance, and news clients. We are also considering WeChat Moments ads . But there is a problem: we can only look at traffic now. We should look at conversion, but the agency doesn't care."

"Many people just do it for the sake of doing it, without promoting it, waiting for it to go viral. In this way, even if it is a good idea, the probability of it spreading is very small."

"In the future, advertising will be increasingly mobile-oriented, with H5 as the main creative and then advertising around it. We need to overturn the current idea of ​​extending print advertising to mobile."

☞ Social Marketing Director of an online travel brand

"In addition to posting our H5s on our own Weibo and WeChat accounts, we can only send red envelopes to various WeChat groups to ask for transfers. There is no good channel."

“I thought about mobile advertising and talked to several companies, but that kind of display method makes it difficult for people to open the ads and trust them.”

“The app opening page may be better, but it is too expensive. As for the banner, when it is displayed on the advertising platform, users will instinctively think it is an advertisement, and their trust will be reduced.”

☞ Have you ever considered advertising on WeChat Moments?

“The effect of Moments ads is actually quite good, but it’s too expensive, and Tencent itself has too many restrictions on H5.”

“The exposure is good, not many people clicked in, but there were many comments”

"Tencent is not looking for blockbuster games now. It is impossible for an H5 game like Nervous Cat to go viral on WeChat Moments. The last case of a blockbuster was when Kris Wu enlisted in the military, which was something Tencent did itself."

The last H5 case that was popular for a while: Is Kris Wu about to join the army? !

Every policy from the top has a countermeasure from the bottom. It is said that there are people in the “H5 world” who are dedicated to studying the algorithmic rules of Tencent’s H5 restrictions:

❶ Abnormal surge in traffic will generally result in blocking. If there is an abnormal surge in traffic (tens of millions), it will easily be targeted.

❷ Behaviors that induce sharing will mostly be blocked, but the definition is vague. However, if you are suspected of inducing sharing, you will be blocked immediately. Directly displaying the prompt for forwarding and sharing will be blocked when the traffic is very small or even 100 UVs. If it is done very obscurely, it will still be blocked when the traffic increases.

Induced sharing is the most common way of dissemination, but the definition of induced sharing is very vague. There is also a more vague rule: if there is "excessive marketing behavior", the app will be blocked. This rule is probably reserved to prevent the emergence of various new gameplay methods in the future.

❸H5 that has been blocked will not work even if you change the domain name. As long as this H5 is blocked, even if you change a new domain name to continue promoting it, it will be blocked immediately, so it is speculated that Tencent may have code analysis. If H5 is deemed to be in violation, then this code will be included in the ban list and it will not work no matter which domain name you change.

❹ In most cases, the account will be blocked as long as someone reports it. About 100 reports can lead to the blocking of an H5 that is not on the whitelist. This shows that Tencent’s review staff is limited. The first round of review of reports should be through machine review. If multiple different accounts report separately, the chance of being blocked should be quite high.

❺The situation would be much better if there was whitelist protection. Under the strict restriction rules, a part of the whitelist is reserved for Tencent’s internal departments, Tencent-related companies and partners. We see that more popular products currently come from these companies. This is understandable. Since you are doing business in someone else's ecosystem, you have to abide by the established rules.

The WeChat team also came out to refute the rumor that “friends circle would be demoted”. In fact, there is no such thing as "demotion of rights", or the term "demotion of rights" is very inaccurate. The factors that limit the spread of H5 are more about content, scope and speed, rather than the so-called "number of friends exceeds 3,000".

Talking about the rules of WeChat is to better adapt to the ecological environment of WeChat. WeChat’s restriction on the emergence of “hot product H5” does not mean that brands have no way out of mobile marketing. After all, the idea that marketing always relies on one big idea is wrong in itself. The marketing work of enterprises should be integrated into daily life.

Let’s look back at this century-old problem: How to promote H5?

Things in the world are so strange: it seems to be a copywriting problem, but it is actually a brand problem. It seems to be a marketing problem, but it is actually a problem of business model. It seems to be a problem of H5 promotion, but behind it is the problem of how to obtain mobile traffic (especially accurate traffic).

Similar to the PC Internet era, everyone knows that they need to embrace the Internet, but after the website is built, it always needs traffic, so Baidu came into being. Everyone understands that it is useless for consumers to just know about it. When it comes to me, it is better to form a transaction and do e-commerce . Even if you build your own e-commerce, you cannot avoid the ultimate problem: traffic. So they all went to Tmall to open stores and built Alibaba.

In the mobile era, it is also a simple truth. Once the H5 mobile marketing page is completed, where does the traffic come from?

When it comes to traffic, some people may think that this is difficult, you can buy it if you have money, see:

☞ BAT all have their own advertising delivery systems: Baidu Alliance, Guangdiantong , and Alimama.

☞ If that doesn’t work, direct customer advertising on various apps: various apps for food, clothing, housing and transportation, social communities, news clients, video clients, e-commerce, browser search, tool software…

☞ To obtain the long-tail traffic of hero app, you can also buy through mobile advertising alliances or platforms: iPinYou, Easy Media, Youmi, Zhongyi, Duomeng, Yidong, Limei, Admob, Adview, Wemobil…

☞ Or on social platforms, Weibo, WeMedia Alliance, various big accounts...

Of course there are channels to buy traffic. We don’t even mention the experience issues of the splash screen, banner, or even native ads themselves. We only talk about traffic. However, such a simple and crude purchase still has important problems that are not solved:

❶ Accuracy of traffic. Mobile terminals need traffic, but what they need more is accurate traffic. Accuracy determines the conversion effect, but also brings another unavoidable problem: cost. We know that using mobile advertising to directly promote APP downloads and divert e-commerce activities is still costly. How many brands will invest in mobile advertising for H5 specifically for brand marketing activities?

❷Lack of social communication scenarios and soil. We know that whether a good advertisement can lead to secondary dissemination has an exponential difference in effect. If H5 advertising on social platforms triggers interaction and active dissemination, the advertising effect can be doubled. Active dissemination and coverage bring earned media, which are the dividends brought by social networking. There is often a lack of soil for dissemination on other apps, which is a fatal flaw.

❸Targeting people does not mean targeting valid users. We can indeed locate people through device ID or social ID, but there is still a long way to go from locating this person, to determining whether he is the user I want, and then to truly developing him into my user, a loyal user. Advertising agencies and advertising platforms cannot control this part, and it is already good enough if they can locate the person.

Mobile advertising is certainly one of the effective ways to acquire new users, but it is expensive. Even if we selectively invest in mobile advertising for major campaigns, what about daily H5s?

How do you promote H5 now? Future Applications conducted a round of research and obtained the following answers:

WeChat public account article & read original text

WeChat account

Retweeted by KOL

WeChat Group

Friends Circle

Add H5 QR code to promotional materials during offline activities

Own recommendation position (Internet company's own promotion resources)

App Advertising

Partner advertising space

Moments Ads

Mobile advertising networks and platforms

After all, various channels can help to acquire users to some extent, the only difference is the efficiency. When it comes to handling long-term relationships between brands and users, this capability still needs to be built up by yourself.

We look at this problem differently based on old and new users:

There are some communication detection tools that can track the H5 communication data and communication effects in the circle of friends, comprehensively count data by region, gender, etc., and find out the active users at key communication nodes.

We might as well call the active users at these key communication nodes the seed users of our brand H5 communication. Chen Hong, CEO of Future Application, has some insights on how seed users drive H5 dissemination:

"Most of the time we see high-quality H5s on WeChat, we see them through individuals in the circle of friends, and rarely open the official account and click on the link to read the original text to visit the H5. This is because there is a group of users on WeChat who are happy to share information. It is human nature to like to share beautiful things, and we happen to have a group of friends who love to share around us, so they become our important source of information reading. And these people are the seed users of dissemination."

☞ Most H5 dissemination paths:

1. Sent from a public account

2. Fans click to read the full text and visit H5, and then are inspired by the content of H5, which results in secondary dissemination and they share H5 to their friends circle

3. A shares it to Moments, and B and C visit this H5 through A's sharing.

4. A's friend C became a fan of the public account because of A's sharing. B did not become a fan but contributed a UV to this reading.

5. There is a phenomenon that although C is also a fan of the public account, his main way of obtaining information is still through A’s sharing.

☞ Inspiration for us:

1. The success of all this depends on whether the H5 is good enough to make people willing to forward it, and whether there are "Fans A" in the official account who are willing to share.

2. Most of the time we don’t have time to check out public accounts. We prefer to check out Moments, and those who actively share in Moments are our source of information. The person around us has already become our “public account”.

WeChat once disclosed a report that 20% of users would actively look for excellent content on public accounts and share it, while the remaining 80% of users would read the content shared by these users.

A to G are all fans of a public account, but they are friends and know each other. Due to different time periods and different levels of fanaticism for the public account, most people will not see the H5 shared in the public account, but most people will see the H5 shared by A on WeChat Moments. This means that A is the real seed user for spreading the message.

So can our proposed communication become like this:

Imagine, if you specially record and operate these seed users on a regular basis, how much communication energy will it bring to the future H5 communication on mobile terminals?

Through such model experiments, Future Applications finally achieved CPS, CPA, APP downloads and other effects on H5.

For new users: Use advertising to find seed users, and then rely on precise seed users to drive a new round of dissemination.

The H5 is completed, and for a campaign, the battle has just begun. How to get it out there has always been a headache, and there is no good solution on the market to fill this gap, which means there are huge business opportunities.

After helping Internet companies with a lot of H5 customization and promotion, and after accumulating a series of experience. Chen Hong discovered the opportunity, and the company was renamed from "Future Application" to "Traffic Source", focusing on overcoming the problems of H5 dissemination and promotion.

Traffic source products:

❶A/B Test, find seed users at the same time.

Conduct a round of A/B testing on different creative ideas and find accurate users at the same time. This is really a key step that kills two birds with one stone: on the one hand, it can test the feedback of the creative idea; on the other hand, it can also find active real users who are willing to share and participate.

Every H5 hopes that visitors can eventually be converted into valuable users. It often costs a lot to acquire new users and traffic, but if the existing traffic can be monetized as much as possible, the cost will be much lower. The probability of this conversion is collectively referred to as the " conversion rate ".

In A/B Testing, you can set up A/B versions for comparative testing to find out which version has a higher conversion rate. A/B Testing is widely used in Internet and e-commerce companies such as Google . Simply put, it uses a small amount of traffic to find the best solution in order to improve the conversion rate of the overall delivery. I think it is particularly suitable for the marketing industry and can avoid waste of marketing resources to the greatest extent.

The use of A/B Test in the H5 promotion process can not only improve the conversion rate, but also use scientific methods to select creative ideas and reduce opportunity costs; obtain a part of seed users and obtain first-hand feedback.

❷The first round of promotion was driven by public accounts and own resources

There are self-media channels, public accounts, WeChat groups, Moments, and KOLs, which rely more on past accumulation.

It’s not enough to just spread it within your own circle. It is very likely that the people in this small circle have a very high degree of overlap. Soon everyone in the small circle knew about it, and the spread of the news encountered a bottleneck. There are also a few hundred people spreading the message in 100 circles at the same time, and finding 3-5 key nodes in each circle. The effect will be much better.

Where do the new users of traffic sources come from?

1. Based on the target user portrait, find vertical communities, groups and circles with similar interests and hobbies to the brand.

2. A large account with which we have cooperated in the past with good results.

3. Mobile advertising (if there is a promotion budget).

❸The second round of dissemination is driven by precise seed users

Through forwarding incentive rules, the fees previously paid to the media are transferred to consumers, driving a new round of targeted communication and improving conversions. We have to thank the great Tencent for teaching us the principles of WeChat red envelopes .

In fact, many people are using this method, but most of them just casually send out red envelopes in a small circle and ask for forwarding. Now there is a special team focusing on this matter, "standardizing" it, and replicating it to different circles.

However, there is a certain threshold for operation, which requires the team to have historical accumulation and experience, promotion and operation capabilities, and precise communication and execution. Several key elements are: A/B testing, finding accurate OpenIDs, designing participation and incentive mechanisms, and one-on-one communication.

It sounds like it may be a more efficient way than casting media all over the place, but I have a further idea. If you can do this, it may be a bigger gold mine:

❶ Label these seed users with different labels and divide them into different circles. Occupation, region, gender, age, interests and hobbies are divided into different labels to ensure that the dissemination nodes are more accurate.

❷If a loyal user is found, this loyal and active user can be rolled back to the brand owner, and then the brand owner can be charged based on this loyal user.

❸ Use systems and tools to automate the communication and incentive mechanisms for these active users.

For brands that have the ability and energy, I suggest you try building a set based on this model. For start-ups and brands with limited budgets, following this method and doing it by hand will definitely produce good results. The methods and ideas are the same. Whether it is done manually or with software tools depends on the amount of data and the amount of repetitive work. Of course, I am still exploring these, and welcome colleagues who are interested to come to Future Applications (WeChat ID: wlyyapp) for more discussions and practices.

Finally, we would like to mention a few tips for H5 promotion that are easy to overlook but very important:

❶ Pay attention to the traffic value of long-tail H5

Many companies ignore their H5 activities after they expire, leaving them idle. Or just stop the page altogether. In fact, these H5s have more or less some long-tail traffic. We can add a link to the latest H5 to the last page of the expired H5, which can also help companies retain some users of the activities.

❷Accumulate users and promotion experience for each marketing campaign

The accumulation of users has been mentioned before, so I will not repeat it here. Through historical dissemination data, we can often find the best dissemination path for different content.

They are all public accounts and self-media that claim to have 100,000 fans, but the communication effects vary greatly, which can be detected through technical means. Over time, we can not only find the key communication nodes, but also find more effective and high-quality self-media. Say goodbye to the misunderstanding of choosing a large size or following KOLs based solely on “feeling”.

❸Continue to optimize H5 after going online

For example, how did an H5 achieve 8 million UVs and more than 10,000 registrations per day? In fact, the promotion process went through 5 to 6 adjustments.

Imagine a scenario:

At the beginning, you may have too many demands on this H5. Not only do you have to forward it and share it with friends, but they also have to follow your official account. Moreover, advertisements occupy most of the page, making it very commercial. If you cancel following public accounts and advertisements on the page, the traffic may increase suddenly. Add advertisements when the number of users reaches 8 million UVs. Although the traffic will start to decrease after adding advertisements, you can continue to spread this H5 by removing advertisements when the traffic decreases and adding advertisements when the traffic increases, and finally achieve your desired goal.

Many people have not fully utilized the biggest advantage of HTML5: it can be updated online in real time. After the H5 is completed, they just ignore it. In fact, there is still a lot of room for exploration.