How to design e-commerce advertising products?

In the e-commerce industry, advertising is an indispensable and extremely important task. The author of this article summarizes the process of designing e-commerce advertising products, and reviews the project that increased conversion rates by 50%, to see how e-commerce advertising products should be designed.

The author is in charge of product work in a vertical e-commerce company. When I just took over a new product line last year, my boss gave me a task to make an advertising page with reference to second-tier e-commerce companies to test the effect of advertising.

Simply sort out the background and keywords, vertical e-commerce companies, and place advertisements in the WeChat mini-program environment to improve advertising effectiveness. The boss’s task is just to point out a direction. What the product manager needs to evaluate is whether this product direction is valuable and how much effort is worth investing.

Advertising is a stable channel for acquiring new users, organizing product lines, and acquiring more high-quality users. This product direction has great value. After confirming the value of the product, proceed to the next step of analyzing the current business situation.

As an aside, what would you do if the requirements assigned by your boss are not of great value?

1. Business Model

The characteristic of e-commerce products is that the business side has a great influence. For example, Alibaba’s operations are at the center of the company. When designing advertising products, it is necessary to first sort out the existing processes and business characteristics in order to prescribe the right remedy. After sorting out, we found that the business model launched by the company is as follows:

The characteristics of our company's advertising business model are: multiple parties involved, a long delivery process, an outsourcing model in cooperation with agencies, and less involvement of the company's business side in the core links of delivery. The delivery environment is WeChat Mini Program. After the user clicks on the ad, our WeChat Mini Program will be directly called up and the ad landing page will be entered.

2. Existing Problems

The core problem is that the cost of new customers (new paying users) is too high, exceeding 100. Because the number of mini program transaction users is one of the core KPIs of the product department, the excessively high cost of new customers makes it impossible to expand the scale of advertising. Further analysis revealed the following procedural problems:

1. There are too few pages available for product placement, and they are too monotonous. They are all regular pages used for promotion, with no hot product pages and lack of customized activity pages;
2. The promotion process lacks business participation. The promotion process of the agency is a black box and we do not fully understand it.
3. There is no real-time data monitoring. Our data interval is 1 day. We can only view the data of the previous day on the same day, and data monitoring is seriously lagging behind.

3. Solution

After discussion, we decided that the goal of the first phase is to reduce the cost of new customers (new transaction users). Analyze the composition of new customer costs, the formula is as follows:

If you want to reduce the cost of new customers, improving the subscription conversion rate is the most important factor. Based on this, we need to do the following:

1. Product design more promotional landing pages
2. Establish a data system that can monitor in real time
3. Establish an advertising delivery process with deep business involvement

To advance the project, we first established a cross-departmental investment team consisting of product, operation, and marketing participants, and also established an investment promotion mechanism involving business participants.

4. Iterative Methodology

Because market launch is cyclical and product development also has cycles, we have identified a method centered on agile iteration and growth experiments to speed up launch, try to shorten the cycle, conduct multiple launch experiments in a short period of time, and improve the conversion rate of launch.

The process of growth experiment is as follows:

5. Product Design

1. Launch a single product page

Our first product attempt was to create a single product page specifically for promotion. The single product page is the core page for e-commerce conversion, and its information structure is relatively fixed and complex.

In the scenario of advertising, user behavior follows the primacy effect, that is, the information that users see at first glance has the greatest impact. The content of conventional single product pages is too complicated. When launching single product pages, we carried out information noise reduction, removing a series of modules and information that are not related to the user's key purchase process, such as comments, related recommendations, stores, collections, rankings, promotions, etc., highlighting the product title and description, so that users can get the selling point information of the product at first glance.

On the other hand, we chose to remove the shopping cart and simplify the purchase process. We allowed users to check out directly without going through the shopping cart. We only kept the [Buy Now] button, which would directly bring up the checkout pop-up window after clicking it, without leaving the page, thus shortening the user's shopping path.

(Product page: first demo)

At the same time, we started recruiting investors and selecting products for the business unit, and we chose the Be & Cheery gift box as the first product to be promoted. Because it is a targeted promotion of the platform, merchants are also willing to provide preferential prices.

The number of users for the first promotion was controlled at tens of thousands, and the cost of new customers was lower than the historical average, which was a great success for our experiment. Next, we quickly iterated three versions of the product page and conducted multiple delivery experiments.

In the advertising scenario, people's first impression of the landing page is established within 50ms. It is very important to convey clear page information and provide users with the right information at the first time. We hope to set a separate price for promotional delivery to attract users.

However, the overall pricing system of e-commerce is complicated. If we wait for the pricing system to be modified, it will take a long time and the uncertainty will be too high. So we chose to display coupons and price discounts on individual products.

Add a configurable price display bar on the product page to highlight the discounted price and reduce the user's thinking cost. Add new customer coupons to single product pages, add pop-up windows for entering to receive coupons, and add pop-up windows for leaving to arouse users' impulses, continuously strengthen and highlight discounts, arouse users' purchasing impulses within a limited time, and strengthen users' mentality of getting a bargain.

(On the product page: add price reminders and coupon pop-ups)

2. Launch the coupon activity page

Business parties often have promotional needs for specific categories, so we designed a coupon redemption activity page to meet the category promotion function. Let the business participate deeply in market launch and promotion, and let the people who understand the categories best decide the categories to promote. This feature has become the most popular promotional tool for category businesses and the most popular promotional page for agencies.

3. Launch the coupon center page

The coupon center is a page commonly used in promotions. Because the company's coupon center page is relatively old and the revision involves too many business parties, we customized a coupon center page specifically for the promotion.

Based on the behavioral data used during the delivery process, the [Recommended Coupons] module is designed to display weighted coupons commonly used by delivery users. In addition, based on the characteristics of the categories selected by delivery users, the order of recommended categories is changed, and weighted coupons for categories that users often use are displayed.

(The coupon collection center page: the left picture is the old page, and the right picture is the new page)

4. Post 9.9 free shipping page

The original 9.9 free shipping page included second-hand books, clothes and other products. Although the price was low, the product cost performance was not high and the conversion rate of the placement was extremely low.

After analysis, we found that the company's recruiting products are low-priced and have cost-effective advantages. In order to expand the product categories and enhance product competitiveness, we transformed the original 9.9 free shipping page and added a business-configurable [Today's Recommendation] module to enable business to select products and participate in promotion. At the same time, we expanded the activity categories and added activity categories such as 19.9 free shipping, 49 yuan for 5 pieces, and 99 yuan for 5 pieces.

This attempt was well received by the category business, with the conversion rate increased by 50% and the order volume greatly increased.

(9.9 free shipping page: the left picture is the old page, the right picture is the new page)

6. Launch Experiment

Rapid iteration, through each small positive iteration, the accumulation of greatly improved results is the core methodology of growth hacking. Our product iteration cycle is to release a version once a week, and the market launch experiment cycle is to conduct at least 2 launch experiments per week. The launch experiments with high conversion rates will be retained, and the launch experiments with low conversion rates will be stopped.

In more than a month, we carried out a total of 7 product iterations and more than 10 launch experiments. At the same time, we have also established a data monitoring background to lay the foundation for flexible adjustments to the promotion.

VII. Conclusion

The overall project conversion rate increased by 50%. Calculating the project revenue, higher sales were achieved while reducing promotion costs, which can bring 2 million yuan in revenue to the company every month. This project also won the company's Strategic Project Award.

The functional level is not actually responsible for the optimization and iteration of e-commerce products. To achieve the project, it is necessary to mobilize the participation of colleagues from various business lines.

On the other hand, not every product iteration can achieve positive results, and not every promotion strategy can bring about changes in all indicators. Some strategies have low new customer costs, but also low average order value and low ROI. Some strategies have moderate new customer costs but high ROIs. The cost of new customers and ROI, the scale of user acquisition, these indicators can only be constantly balanced.

There is never an optimal solution for advertising. What we need to do is to establish a combination of strategies to balance indicators such as new customer acquisition, conversion, average order value, etc., and achieve a dynamic balance based on the company's goals.

Author: Zuoshousi

Source: E-commerce Product Notes