Monthly turnover of 60 million was selected into Tencent's social advertising game white paper, reviewing the advertising case of "Huluwa"

The buying volume market has exploded in the past one or two years, and has quickly entered a fiercely competitive market this year. It is no longer so easy to succeed through buying volume.

However, since its launch in March last year, the Chinese comic IP-adapted mobile game "Huluwa", developed by Aoshitang and jointly released by Sijiuyou and Zhanshang Zongheng, has achieved a monthly turnover of 60 million step by step through purchasing traffic, and within three months after its launch, it has remained at the top of the iOS paid list. By April 2017, the cumulative number of registered users had exceeded 18 million, and the daily active users had exceeded 350,000.

In fact, "Huluwa" is a mobile game that combines horizontal action with SLG gameplay. Compared with other categories, the performance of this type of game will be slower. In addition, the domestic animation IP has not been favored by the industry in the past period of time. From a general point of view, it is difficult to achieve such conditions. The current performance of "Huluwa" can be said to have broken the industry's inherent perception of products adapted from Chinese comic IPs and buying volume operations.

It should be noted that after Sijiuyou combined its own experience in buying traffic with the advantages of Tencent's social advertising, the advertising conversion rate of "Huluwa" was at least 30% higher than that of all products under Sijiuyou. In order to achieve this effect, the two parties also tried nearly a hundred sets of advertising ideas.

Among them, the most effective advertising material "Advanced Picture" can control the cost of Android users within 18 to 25 yuan, and the average user cost can also be controlled within 40 to 50 yuan.

Now, "Huluwa" has become the only case in the practical version of Tencent's social advertising game white paper. It has also been used as a typical case within Tencent and has been shared many times. Let’s take a closer look at how this product works in terms of distribution and purchasing.

Let’s take a quick look at the product’s features. The mobile game "Huluwa" is a product adapted from a Chinese comic IP. The game restores the animation and plot of the original work to a great extent, and incorporates some advanced gameplay on this basis, such as gourd equipment, farm gameplay, etc. In addition, since "Huluwa" belongs to the old generation of animation and adopts a paper-cutting style, there are almost no similar game products in the market today.

The biggest selling point of the game is the well-known Calabash Brothers themselves and the story of Calabash Brothers fighting against the goblins to save his grandfather. The desire to return to childhood and feel happy hidden deep in the hearts of the target audience is what needs to be taken into consideration when designing the advertisement.

Analyzing from the user attributes, most of the users who have watched the original "Huluwa" animation were born in the 1980s, and this animation can also influence the next generation, such as those born in the 1990s and 1995s, who are all target users.

After an in-depth analysis of the user base of "Huluwa" by Tencent's social advertising team, it was found that the user profile of this IP is 20 to 35 years old, mostly male, with a basic educational level of college or above, and mainly urban white-collar and blue-collar users. In terms of marital status, the proportion of single and married users is relatively high, and they are more capable and interested in recharging and paying.

Further insight into player interest data revealed that players who like Calabash Brothers also have a high interest in social, news, video, tools , online games , life, music, and leisure apps.

The reasons for choosing Tencent social advertising are: first, its market share is very high and its user coverage is relatively large; second, it has more publicity channels, abundant traffic resources and diversified advertising forms, coupled with a more standardized and complete operation service system, which can provide more comprehensive and in-depth operation guidance and assistance on the advertiser side, which is more conducive to the publisher to push products to target users from different angles.

During the cooperation process, Tencent Social Advertising provided many kinds of help:

First, Sijiuyou has placed picture and video ads , as well as some native ads , in Tencent's social advertising space FEED, WeChat Moments and other resources. At every stage and in every form of advertising, whether it is material optimization or delivery strategy, Tencent can provide professional optimization suggestions.

Second, Tencent Social Advertising will introduce the latest advertising formats to Sijiuyou as soon as possible, conduct first-tier purchasing and placement, and continue to try to use the platform's latest advertising formats to attract users' attention, allowing users to see more different forms of brand impressions and better reduce the average registration price.

Third, for long-term deep cooperation partners, during the delivery process, the big data insight analysis support provided by Tencent Social Advertising to Sijiuyou has, to a large extent, helped the product to better identify the characteristics of core users and played an important guiding role in choosing the targeting of advertising.

Fourth, Tencent Social Advertising regularly provides one-on-one training to Sijiuyou’s front-line employees, aligning information to better help its employees improve their specific operational skills in advertising .

1. Clarify the purpose of the campaign

In the early days of the game’s launch, we hope to leverage the influence of the IP to allow players to have a better sense of immersion in the game, and then maximize the original influence on this basis, so that players can resonate with the game and be more willing to participate in the game.

In the middle and late stages, the influence of IP will be used more to drive the game, and then the game will be used to form a stronger IP influence, shaping the game into a more influential IP. Sijiuyou also hopes to find the right point in the direction of domestic comics and domestic IP to create its own brand, or activate the original domestic IP.

2. Broad-based delivery strategy

Through the understanding of the "Huluwa" IP and the study of user portraits, three directions are obtained:

The first is to focus on revisiting classics, relying on the topic of restoring classics to evoke childhood memories and allow users who resonate with the stories to download and enter the game.

Secondly, we will target our advertising users to those born in the 1980s and early 1990s, who are the backbone of society with relatively strong spending power.

The third is to continuously iterate the advertising format, using the combination of videos and pictures to further let users understand the game and relive some classic scenes they saw in their childhood.

3. Planning of the delivery cycle

In the early stage, we focused on IP sentiment, carried out daily media news exposure, and carefully operated the "Huluwa" mobile game official account and game forum to provide players with a suitable place for interactive communication. At the same time, we can also understand the issues that players care about at the first time, and make timely adjustments and reflections in subsequent product operations and advertising.

In the medium term, we carried out various cross-industry collaborations, such as shooting variety shows, making appearances at large exhibitions, etc. In addition, we customized multiple batches and different types of "Huluwa" exclusive peripherals, which were distributed in conjunction with corresponding activities, which promoted the activeness of players in the game and formed spontaneous word-of-mouth communication among players.

Player-organized events

Later, we combined the IP itself to do brand promotion , tried to cooperate with variety shows to produce special programs, and relied on dozens of satellite TV stations, local TV stations, and online video sites for dissemination, filling the gap in online advertising and covering a wider range of new user groups.

Huluwa’s variety show ads

4. Planning costs

The company invests 30 to 40 million yuan in buying traffic every month, and in addition, it spends 1 to 3 million yuan every month on brand promotion , including entertainment, variety shows, and TV commercials.

The cost of buying traffic will gradually increase with the trend of product data and the accumulation of users. In the early stage, data optimization is the main focus, and the cost of buying traffic is controlled at 3 to 5 million per month. When the number of users accumulated to a certain level and the data performed well, the monthly consumption increased to 20 to 30 million, and even to the current monthly consumption of 30 to 40 million.

5. Consider the appropriate promotion channels

In the early stage, the main consideration is to import accurate quantities to help optimize the product. In the later stage, the focus is on media and advertising is carried out according to the form of advertising display. Without considering purchasing the points wall , the user quality is not up to standard.

The main considerations for selecting channels are: first, cost input and recovery effect; second, the scale of the channel. In this regard, Tencent's social advertising has a very large coverage, so the scale is not a problem. In addition, we choose the top 20~top 50 channels in the market for delivery, covering social categories (such as QQ space, WeChat Moments ), news clients, video, live broadcast products and other aspects.

In fact, advertising creativity requires constant trial and exploration. During the promotion process, Calabash Brothers tried nearly a hundred sets of creative materials, but only a few of them could produce very good results.

1. Examples of creative advertising production

1) Picture ads mainly use three creative directions to attract players' attention, namely classic feelings, combining social hot spots, and advanced creativity.

Classic sentiment-based creativity: generally some classic scenes and fighting scenes from cartoons are selected. For example, in the following advertising material, the fighting scene between Calabash Brothers and the Snake Demon from the original cartoon is used. The scene and the picture are well-known scenes in the original work and can also evoke the memories of players.

Combine social hot spots with creativity: For example, during the period when "My First Half of Life" was popular, "Huluwa" launched the following advertising materials, combining hot topics to attract new users to the game.

Advanced creativity: It will combine the characteristics of both animation and game to let players accurately understand that this is a game advertisement . For example, in the following advanced advertising material, in addition to the classic original pictures, the concept of game star upgrade is also introduced to attract more accurate game users.

2) Video creativity: Add music from the original work to the video ad, so that players can hear the music when they open the video ad, which quickly evokes players' memories. For example, in the following advertising material, the background music that appears in the scene of Calabash Brothers in the original cartoon is used, which easily makes players think of Calabash Brothers and stimulates players to download.

2. Optimization examples of advertising materials

When optimizing advertising materials, we need to not only pay attention to the frequency and volume of advertising updates, but also focus on the creativity of advertising images and videos. At present, Sijiuyou has also carried out in-depth cooperation with Tencent Social Advertising. While ensuring a good advertising experience for users, it also shows players different types of classic creativity to deepen user impressions and interests.

The following set of materials was used during the launch of "Huluwa". Before optimization, the click-through rate of the materials was 1.2%, and the registration cost was 38 yuan. During the optimization process, weapon special effects were added and the background color was enriched, which increased the click-through rate by more than 2 times after optimization and reduced the registration cost to 16 yuan.

Before optimization:

After optimization:

3. Continue to expand the audience of advertising

After importing precise amounts of data with precise materials in the early stage, the revenue scale of "Huluwa" has reached the level of 30 million. At this point, if new users are to be introduced, it is necessary to consider expanding the IP audience group to include family users, users who like anime, and female users .

In actual operation, in addition to combining hot spots and opening up advertising targeting, game developers also cooperated to produce some targeted gameplay content. For example, the game has a series of dress-up gameplay for the character of Little Butterfly, which can stimulate the desire of female players to pay and achieve the effect of tapping into female users.

It can be seen that among all advertising creatives, advanced image advertising creatives have the best results, and have achieved very good results in conversion rate, unit price, recovery, etc. For example, in Tencent and other media, this set of materials has controlled the unit price per user within 18 to 25 yuan in terms of directing traffic to the Android channel .

Overall, the average user cost of "Huluwa" is controlled within 40 to 50 yuan. Moreover, from a long-term perspective, user costs have been continuously controlled. Since the IP itself is not a time-sensitive IP but a national classic IP, it has a lasting impact on both new and old players. Therefore, advertising effects including B station spoof materials, Tieba topic materials, etc. can continue to create popularity for the game.

This also meant that Calabash Brothers only took 4 to 6 months to recover its costs, which is a relatively fast product among SLG products. At the same time, the long-tail traffic effect of "Huluwa" is also very significant. It can obtain more than 1 million traffic per month on App Store and iOS channels alone.

Even though the scale of the entire market is now in a period of rapid growth, the entry of volume-buying manufacturers has made actual operations increasingly difficult, and the volume-buying market has become increasingly difficult to operate. In this case, buying traffic will test the manufacturer's experience and hard power. How to find advertising creativity, how to optimize, how to tap into the characteristics of the product, and how to tap into the characteristics of the IP will become the key to the distribution and buying traffic operation.

From a product perspective, "Huluwa" is a game that focuses more on SLG gameplay. It has completely different gaming fun from the most common AR PG games in the buying market, and its graphics style is also unique, so its main users can avoid the most competitive areas.

At the same time, we can also find that "Huluwa" can achieve its current results through effective purchase of traffic, which also shows that targeted promotion of IP, by refining the characteristics of IP and transforming it into advertising creativity and products, can accurately reach target users and still find its place in the highly competitive market.