Report | Research report on the marketing effectiveness of information flow advertising in 8 major industries

In recent years, information flow ads have become increasingly favored by advertisers. The personalized delivery and natural and native content display allow users to be "recommended" without realizing it.

However, due to its newness, there is still a lot of room for improvement in the expectations of information flow advertising comparison theory . Toutiao has been “painstakingly” looking for more “reading gaps” for users to insert ads to increase conversions ; WeChat has segmented the only ad space in Moments to give more advertisers the opportunity to “reach the pinnacle of life”; Weibo, as the “number one pan -social platform”, has painstakingly studied “information social networking” to make ads more acceptable; Baidu has added “ AI technology” on the basis of its “search advantage” to improve the distribution and conversion efficiency of information flow ads…

In order to enable advertisers to master the secrets to improve the effectiveness of information flow advertising and make it easier to optimize delivery efficiency . Recently, commissioned by Baidu, Kantar Millward Brown conducted a study on the effectiveness of information flow advertising and interviewed leading brands in eight major industries including finance, automobiles , online games , cosmetics, fast-moving consumer goods, education, home appliances, and technology to jointly explore the decisive factors of the effectiveness of information flow advertising and help advertisers make use of this emerging marketing tool .

From the audience's perspective, current users are exposed to no less than 600 advertisements per week and have a very low willingness to accept advertising information. Information flow ads are integrated into native content, providing audiences with information that suits their current reading environment without causing them to feel disturbed. For the media, simple hard ads on the already small mobile phone screen often affect the user's reading experience, while information flow ads can achieve profitability while protecting the audience's experience. For advertisers, information flow ads are integrated into the audience's life scenes and can communicate with them accurately and deeply, achieving higher ROI. More and more advertisers have recognized the important role of information flow advertising in integrated marketing .

From the user's perspective, the reason why information flow content products have risen rapidly in recent years is precisely because of their ability to accurately capture user interests and push content. Whether based on social relationships or on big data of user browsing behavior, information flow products bring about a shift from "you show me" to "I want to see" .

The report found in a survey of advertisers and agencies in eight major industries, including finance, automobiles, and fast-moving consumer goods, that compared with traditional marketing tools, "being precise" has become advertisers' biggest expectation for information flow advertising. When it comes to the criteria for judging the quality of information flow advertising, everyone unsurprisingly mentioned accuracy, but how to define accuracy becomes the real key .

The report points out that there are two ways to achieve accurate push of information flow advertisements, namely "interest" and "intention", both of which require relying on rich and connected data . However, with the help of big data such as browsing behavior, interaction data, and user usage preferences, we can draw a user interest portrait, while search data, geographic location data, purchase data, etc. can draw a user intention portrait .

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In fact, the difference between interest and intention was clearly explained to us by our professor in the first marketing class in college, that is, the difference between consumers' "demand" and "want" (Editor's note: it is also the difference between a goddess and a wife, if you are not clear, go and look up your notes). Interests can capture users’ “normal needs”, while intentions can locate users’ “top needs” in the current scenario . In the report, Kantar Millward Brown objectively demonstrated the difference in actual delivery effects produced by "intent" and "interest" targeting by comparing two sets of case data from the financial industry and the automotive industry among eight industries. In the case of a financial client, we can directly see that after using intent targeting, there is a significant decrease in CPC expenditure, which is 21% lower than that of interest targeting; but CTR (click-through rate) is increased by 158% . The ROI effect is very intuitive.

Analyzed from the perspective of consumer purchasing decisions , the "interest" level is relatively low. If you simply capture the user's interest and stimulate it at the "interest" stage, the stimulation will be ineffective and may even cause the user to become bored. However, if advertising stimulation can be carried out after the user has completed "interest arousal" and based on the "intention" exposed when "collecting information", it will directly affect consumption decisions and establish a consumption action path.

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As Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing communications and professor at Northwestern University, once said: "Interest is to understand what users have needed in the past, while intent is to identify what users want now and in the future."

The current mainstream information flow advertising platforms are mainly divided into video, social and information categories. Among them, video information flows represented by Youku Tudou have an advantage in in-depth communication. At the same time, due to their data characteristics, their products focus more on users' "browsing interests";

Social platforms such as WeChat, Weibo, and Momo have the advantages of high interactivity and viral fission of information. Users are more interested in entertainment, so the platform naturally follows the user's choice and promotes interest-based push.

Among information platforms, Toutiao, which has complete interest tags, has now grown to a considerable scale. Tencent and NetEase News clients each have their own advantages in interest positioning, but due to the lack of user life scenario data, they are still somewhat unable to carry out "intention redirection".

In comparison, platforms that use powerful "search data" as a basis and use "AI technology" for deep mining can take the lead in the topic of "precise intent" .

Kantar Millward Brown retrieved the results of information flow advertising on the Baidu mobile platform for further analysis to confirm the judgment . Take a certain automobile advertiser as an example. It used "intent targeting + information flow". Compared with information flow advertising without intent targeting, it reduced the cost per click by 70% and the CPL by 76%, while the targeting accuracy increased by 35%, and the appointment success rate increased by 65%. A certain financial advertiser's February campaign saw a huge increase of 360% in the number of registrations, even though the CPA expenditure decreased by 26%.

In the current fragmented media environment, marketing conversion rate has become a painful issue for traditional marketing methods. Baidu’s attempt at intent marketing is a good strategy. The increasingly popular information flow advertising will continue to attract attention from the industry. As research continues to deepen, advertisers and even the entire Internet marketing industry will obtain more accurate and effective marketing methods.