Credit card advertising and banking app user growth bottleneck

What are people competing for in the Internet circle? Number of users!

Because users = traffic = money!

The simplest and most scalable way to acquire traffic is to buy advertising . The top five industries in terms of advertising consumption are e-commerce, games, education, tools, and finance.

Especially the e-commerce and gaming industries, which are typical players with large traffic. Just look at ByteDance’s (rumored) advertising revenue last year and you will know. It was 183 billion in 2020, of which 50-51 billion came from e-commerce and 45 billion came from games.

The advertising market in the financial and education industries suffered a severe setback due to policy influence. Finance includes banking, insurance (traditional), securities, Internet finance, and Internet insurance. Internet finance has the largest buying volume but is also the hardest hit. The turbulence of the broader market is also mainly influenced by the Internet finance industry.

I heard from industry insiders that due to various negative news in the Internet finance industry, many industry talents have returned to banks. Perhaps, these are all good news for banks. Banks also need to work harder and accelerate their embrace of the Internet!

This article is divided into 3 parts:

1. Let’s start with bank MAU

2. Let’s talk about bank card ads

3. The rise of live advertising in banking apps

01. Let’s start with bank MAU

In recent years, the banking industry has been engaged in financial technology in a vigorous manner, aiming to build an Internet financial system, hoping that they can grow like Internet companies and use MAU (monthly active users) to drive AUM (asset management scale) .

Therefore, banks are also racking their brains to increase MAU. In the eyes of banks, their competitors are not just banks, but more are targeting Alipay and others.

According to some data reports on the Internet, the top five banks in terms of monthly active users are China Construction Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Merchants Bank and Bank of China .

In terms of monthly active users of a single APP, CCB is higher than other banks, but the monthly active users are basically not over 100 million. Some banks' multiple APPs combined barely exceed 100 million:

The 2020 annual report released by China Merchants Bank shows that the monthly active users of its two apps, "China Merchants Bank" and "Life on the Palm", reached 107 million, while the 2019 annual report showed it was 102 million.

The total monthly active users of ICBC's four major mobile apps, "Three Rongs and One Active" (Rong e-Bank, Rong e-Link, Rong e-Shopping and ICBC e-Life), have exceeded 100 million.

Let’s take a look at Alipay’s monthly active users:

In 2020, Ant Group disclosed that the monthly active users of Alipay have exceeded 700 million.

Well, the gap between banks and Alipay is still a bit big...

However, do banks really need to use MAU as their target like Internet companies? After all, no one opens the bank app every day, right? Is it transferring money, checking the balance, or financial management?

Compared with Alipay, the main thing that bank apps lack is high-frequency life scenarios . In order to increase user activity, banks have integrated many offline scenarios into the APP, or referred to Alipay and even Pinduoduo, and also adopted some social marketing methods.

Therefore, as bank users, we can feel the following changes:

When you go to an offline outlet, you used to press the number plate, but now you open the mobile app to get a number. If you haven't downloaded it, download it first...

What about those who didn’t go to the bank branches? There are also various activity notices posted at the door of the bank, such as one can enter the store and receive a bottle of Coke every week by using the APP...

I didn’t go to the outlets and didn’t see the event notice. Through social marketing, such as logging in to the APP to receive red envelopes, free laundry detergent...

The banks have put a lot of thought and effort into this activity. Although banks see themselves as very internet-based, they are still very traditional enterprises in the Internet circle.

02. Let’s talk about bank card advertising

Although the overall advertising consumption in the Internet finance industry has declined significantly, leading companies such as 360 Jieqiao still spend several million per day.

Banks are relatively conservative in their investments, so they have been lukewarm over the years and have not received much attention from the media. Because the budget of banks is really small compared to that of Internet companies, some media even look down on them and are not willing to spend much time on banks...

Banks are also increasing their investment in Internet advertising every year, but some budgets really cannot be spent! What exactly is the problem? Maybe it’s because there are too many restrictions in the bank, the efficiency is slow, and the advertising optimization is not effective...

Let’s talk about common credit card advertisements and savings card advertisements.

The competition among card-issuing banks is actually quite fierce, and customer acquisition has also encountered serious bottlenecks. Traditional customer acquisition is mainly through setting up stalls or selling at outlets. If the transaction is successful, luggage, thermos cups, etc. are given away to attract users. However, the conversion rate of these tactics continues to decline.

Therefore, banks are also trying to get closer to Internet traffic. However, due to the restrictions of various internal rules and regulations, bank advertising has been restricted by traditional online customer acquisition for many years and has never broken through the bottleneck...

(1) Advertising cooperation model

The first time I came across a bank advertisement was in 2015 for a credit card project of a certain bank. The card opening settlement cost was 80 at that time. We tried it out, but found that the card opening data could not be provided in real time, and the forms were not allowed to add codes for statistics. The data had to be manually exported by the bank and fed back to us. The form number was T+2, and the card opening number was T+7.

I thought it was just a test, so it didn’t matter. I made a small investment and looked at the data. Two days later, I got the form data from the bank and calculated the form cost to be more than 20. It was much better than expected, and I thought there should still be hope that I can continue to play with it within the KPI of card opening cost. Then I waited for a few days to get the card opening data and calculated that the card opening cost was 120.

I roughly sorted out the data in the form, deducted the invalid applications, non-new accounts, and unactivated new accounts, and after all the deductions, only this much is left. Then we also analyze which parts of the entire path can be optimized. The part that may need to be optimized the most is the landing page. Multiple card types are grouped on one page, and the card types offered at the time are ordinary cards, but the landing page defaults to high-end cards. Some users don’t know this and directly click submit, which then gets rejected during the bank review.

At that time, we also proposed modification suggestions to the bank, such as improving the user experience of the advertising delivery path, or providing a single-card landing page, but these are unlikely to happen...

In addition to offline branches and sales channels, banks now acquire customers online through agent channels. Of course, the cooperation models and settlement costs of different banks and different types of cards are different. The cooperation model of the same bank and the same type of card will also be adjusted based on the feedback from agents and actual market conditions.

There are three types of credit card cooperation models:

Settlement is based on the number of valid forms , ranging from dozens to dozens.

The settlement is based on the number of pre-issued cards , ranging from dozens to hundreds, but there are generally steps. The more pre-issued cards there are, the higher the corresponding single card settlement price may be.

Settlement based on the number of pre-issued cards + subsidy for subsequent behavior . There is a basic settlement after the card is issued, and there will be further incentives when the user takes subsequent actions, such as an additional settlement after the credit card is activated or the savings card is activated.

Of course, the difficulty will increase as you progress through the entire user chain, and the data latency will also increase, which will also increase the risk of advertising revenue for agents.

(2) Advertising conversion chain

Before placing an advertisement, the most important thing for agents is to first understand the entire user conversion path. It is best to get a benchmark reference value at each node (you can ask the bank for average data, or inquire about the market average data from the media or industry).

The process of users applying for a credit card through an ad:

1. User sees a credit card ad
2. Users click on the ad to enter the H5 landing page
3. User fills in the form to apply for a credit card
4. The bank will check the form data and remove invalid forms (forms with inconsistent age, non-issuing place of the bank, repeated applications, and failure to pass the public security real-name verification will be deemed invalid)
5. The bank will conduct a telephone review of the valid form users, and after the review is passed, the card will be produced and mailed
6. After receiving the card, the user activates it by himself (APP, phone or offline outlets)

Therefore, we can see from the whole process that there will be a chain of several key indicators: ad exposure number -> click number -> landing page arrival number -> form application number -> valid submission number -> pre-issued card number -> activation number

The savings card process is basically the same as above, except that the requirements for activating the savings card are a little stricter. In the 5th step, you will be notified via SMS to go to a bank branch to apply for the card. Users must go to the branch to apply before they can receive the card, and the deposit must be greater than a certain amount for it to be considered an account activation.

Share some credit card advertising data:

The form costs between 15-30

The effective rate of submission is about 70%-90%

The card verification rate is about 12%-20%

The activation rate is about 60%-80%

When the entire funnel is calculated, the leakage is still quite large. It is not easy to break even on the advertising costs. Each node in it needs to be analyzed in detail. Moreover, the time involved varies. For example, it may take three days to mail the card, and users may not activate the card immediately after receiving it.

As for savings cards, based on the bank account classification management mechanism, they are generally divided into Type I bank accounts, Type II bank accounts and Type III bank accounts. The bank's savings card settlement is generally only for new accounts, i.e. Class I accounts. Therefore, advertising also involves indicators such as new customer application rate and account activity rate . This really depends on everyone's data targeting capabilities. Of course, it would be even better if you could obtain the bank's old customer data for exclusion. As for going to the branch after applying, there will be a delay of about 3 to 7 days. Whether the account will be activated after receiving the card is another matter.

(3) Advertising process

In addition to the regular qualifications, bank account opening also requires a "Financial License", and then follow the procedures to complete public verification, recharge and payment, etc. However, the key point is the preparation work before the launch, which includes product selection, data and targeting strategy.

【Product Selection】

It sounds a bit similar to e-commerce sales, because savings cards and credit cards also have different types of cards, involving different layouts, different rights and selling points, etc. You can choose the type of card you want to launch based on different groups of people, different media attributes, and different settlement prices.

After deciding on the type of card you want to promote, get the link to the landing page for the advertisement from the bank. It would be best if you can get a link for a single card type. Usually these links will have parameters behind them to identify the conversion data of the link, so if you want to test multiple media or multiple strategies, it is best to have several links to use separately.

【data】

The long conversion data cycle is a common problem in the credit card advertising business, so in the early stage we can only use the average activation rate and average account turnover rate data to reversely calculate the form cost, and control the real-time form data monitoring work when the advertisement is delivered.

If you want to use oCPX target conversion bidding when placing advertisements, you also need the support of form conversion data. However, in actual work scenarios, it is inevitable that you will encounter situations where you cannot add code to the ad landing page, cannot connect to the API, or the scheduling takes a long time. Fortunately, mainstream advertising platforms now support Xpath conversion tracking methods.

The advantage of XPath is that it is a visual operation that does not require any technical knowledge or code changes. In other words, optimizers can operate it themselves, with no threshold, conveniently and quickly. However, the accuracy is not as high as that of JS code or API. For example, when counting the number of forms, a user clicking the form submission button once is counted as one conversion. If a pop-up prompt appears after clicking the button indicating that the filled-in content is incorrect, resulting in the form not being actually submitted, it will also be counted as one conversion. Moreover, the conversion data counted is not deduplicated. If the same user clicks multiple times, it will be recorded as multiple conversions.

【Directional】

Due to the large data delay, targeted screening of the population in the early stages becomes particularly important. And most importantly, the bank’s specific review standards are not public, so they can only screen the population as best as possible based on the reasons for invalid forms. for example:

Target cities where the bank has offline outlets

Choose the fan group of the personality or cartoon character according to the card type and layout

Exclude people who have already applied for a credit card or installed the credit card app (some advertising backends can provide this type of data)

Exclude converted people

Age 18-45

Combining data such as mobile phone prices, education level, and residential areas can further filter the quality of the crowd

Summary: Although bank advertisements are no longer traditional brand advertisements, many of them are CPA effect advertisements. Especially for major branches, advertising must be effective, but there are several problems with advertising in the banking circle:

1. The user conversion experience is not friendly enough : the form has many fields. The form requires filling in a lot of information such as name, phone number, ID card, occupation, income, address, company, etc. Some banks' forms have more than 20 fields to fill in. Some banks are also trying to produce short forms later. In addition, some cards do not support online activation and must be processed at offline outlets. This may be an obvious defect compared to Internet finance.

2. The conversion chain is long and the conversion statistics cycle is long : a long cycle means slow recovery, and the high risk brought by slow loss calculation will cause agents to be relatively conservative in increasing sales.

3. Small space for optimizing landing pages and materials : It is impossible to customize and ask the bank to make changes. The pages provided by the bank must be used, and it is difficult to restore the advertising scenarios and usage scenarios.

4. Long data acquisition cycle: Conversion data docking is difficult, most do not support API docking, and data analysis and optimization are not so timely. A lot of data can only be provided offline. For example, savings cards are divided into Category I and Category II accounts, but agents do not have this data support. Agents also cannot control whether the user is an old account, whether they have gone to the store to pick up the card or moved the account, and other processes.

03. The rise of live advertising in banking apps

Because the number of Internet users and traffic has "peaked", people will actually pay more attention to the infrastructure of refined operations and the exploration of the value of existing users, so "pulling business" is becoming more and more common in the industry. If some people still ask what "pulling business" means, then they are quite out of date!

Currently, live-streaming advertising is mainly used in platform e-commerce, finance, and online service industries, such as Taobao, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Suning, Xianyu, Alipay, Meituan, Zhihu, etc. The main model is to connect using the RTA method, using the advertiser's data to make preliminary judgments before bidding on advertisements, such as targeting old users when generating activity and filtering old users when attracting new users.

As of December 2020, the monthly active user rankings of the top financial industry apps compiled by QuestMobile are as shown in the figure below. All of them are players with monthly active users of more than 40 million . The first one is Alipay with 769 million, and the second one is China Construction Bank with more than 90 million. The gap between them is quite large. Both of China Merchants Bank's two major apps have also squeezed into the TOP10, with China Merchants Bank having more than 70 million users and Palm Life having more than 40 million. There will be some overlap between the users of the two apps.

The biggest business representative in the financial industry should be Alipay, which is affiliated with Alibaba . The price on the market is roughly a few cents to 1 yuan per transaction. There are also many agents involved, some of which have tens of thousands of devices per day, and some of which are large enough to reach millions of devices.

The emerging representative of banks is China Merchants Bank . As a loyal user of China Merchants Bank, I think China Merchants Bank is indeed one of the most advanced banks in the field of Internet marketing. For example, the recent popular China Merchants Bank's two-dimensional video marketing on Bilibili, or the current RTA business promotion, are enough to prove this.

However, because the user scale of China Merchants Bank is much smaller than that of Alipay, the price given by China Merchants Bank APP is also higher. However, the number of agents and the scale of equipment used by each agent are still much smaller than that of Alipay.

In general, the various actions of China Merchants Bank can be regarded as a weather vane for the banking industry. We expect that in the next two to three years, various banks will make greater progress and breakthroughs in user growth.

Author: Liang Lili

Source: Advertising Practitioners Study Room