Changes in the traffic market in 2020

2020 is a very unforgettable year in the hearts of many people. From the epidemic before the New Year to the resumption of work after the New Year, from the ups and downs of different industries under the influence of the epidemic to the changing trends in mobile Internet traffic, there are many memories worth remembering. As an optimizer working on the front line of advertising, I would like to briefly talk about the changes in mobile Internet traffic in 2020 in my opinion.

1. Search is still a rigid demand, but user habits have slowly changed

Search is not only a necessity now, but will always be a necessity in the future. This statement is still reasonable when applied to Baidu at present, that is - Baidu is now the king of search engines and will continue to be the king for a long time in the future.

We know that as early as 2019, Toutiao Search had been eyeing Baidu, and later launched an independent APP and acquired Hudong Baike. In September of this year, Toutiao and Douyin, both under ByteDance, launched search advertising. This is an important milestone for ByteDance. It means that in the field of search advertising, Toutiao has officially attacked Baidu's heartland. Although it is still a lot of noise but little action at the moment, with such a huge number of users as TikTok, who can say that it cannot be surpassed in the future?

In addition to Toutiao, Tencent acquired Sogou this year and added support to WeChat Search; Alibaba supported Quark Search, and Huawei launched Petal Search. These are all major events in the search market this year. But as in the past, although these searches have their own characteristics, none of them can shake Baidu's market.

However, despite Baidu's unrivaled position in the search field, according to a report by iMedia Research, the number of Chinese mobile search users is expected to reach 754 million in 2020. Among them, although mobile search engines are still the primary entry point for netizens to obtain information, social platforms and e-commerce platforms have accounted for 49% and 35.3% respectively, which shows that nearly half of the people have begun to use social platforms to search for content.

Currently, user habits in the search market have expanded from traditional search engines such as Baidu, Sogou, 360, and Shenma to platforms such as WeChat, Toutiao, Douyin, Zhihu, and Xiaohongshu. With the development of vertical search in the future, Baidu's share is bound to decline.

2. Smart promotion + landing page/CRM system hosting has become the main theme

This year, the advertising systems of the five mainstream search platforms in the market have already had smart bidding, namely OCPC. Among them, Baidu and Toutiao are the most intelligent and complete. 360 Sogou and Shenma all have oCPCs, but they are far from mature.

Baidu has also made major upgrades to its OCPC this year, including lowering of thresholds, upgrading delivery packages to bidding strategies, etc., plus the upgrade of the data platform Stargazing Disk, it can be seen that Baidu is making frequent moves in the areas of intelligent bidding and crowd data collection. Let’s talk about ByteDance. This year, ByteDance connected the search ads of Toutiao and Douyin and opened them up to everyone. This is a big change. Although ByteDance search advertising currently accounts for a small proportion of its overall revenue, the potential of Douyin search cannot be underestimated.

In addition to smart bidding, hosting remains the main theme this year. The Baidu hosting of landing pages for all industries, which was circulated in the industry last year, has not been realized this year. However, many industry landing pages have already switched to Jimuyu. This shows that it is only a matter of time before the entire industry switches. According to the author's understanding, some regions and some industries are currently switching base fish in batches.

From the perspective of supervision and platform traffic closing, the landing page will eventually be hosted. What we, the front-line advertising optimizers, should do is to accept the changes in the industry and prepare for the future. When the change comes, we will have mastered how to deal with it, so that we can have a smooth transition and ensure results. In addition to landing page hosting, Baidu has also made many upgrades and activities on its CRM system AiFanFan this year. In fact, the purpose is the same as that of landing page hosting, which can be summed up in four words - ecology and closed loop.

As for Xiaosou, 360 Sogou and others, they will inevitably move in this direction. Earlier, Sogou launched the Sunflower Project and UC's Jinfan Website Construction, both of which followed this trend.

3. Competition in information flow continues, and the threshold for direct e-commerce is gradually rising

The information flow market has also undergone major changes this year, with Tencent and ByteDance being the most eye-catching. Tencent has upgraded its information flow advertising system several times this year, including upgrades to bidding, advertising placements, data reports, etc., and has introduced many new tools, making the advertising system more mature and complete. ByteDance has also made huge moves this year.

Currently, Douyin’s daily active users have exceeded 600 million. my country’s current population is about 1.4 billion, which means that one in three people is a TikTok user. Although this conversion relationship is not very accurate, it can allow us to feel the huge number of users and radical expansion of Tik Tok.

At present, Douyin information flow advertising is the king of the information flow market, followed by Baidu information flow and Tencent advertising. In 2020, ByteDance’s fastest-growing revenue source was not information flow, but Douyin e-commerce. According to a report by Tencent Technology in November (relevant articles can be searched), people familiar with the matter said that as the fastest growing business within ByteDance, the total merchandise transaction volume of the Douyin e-commerce platform this year will reach RMB 150 billion.

ByteDance’s current e-commerce system is very large, including the well-known Luban direct e-commerce, Douyin stores, live streaming sales, cooperation with third-party e-commerce platforms, and so on. In the field of e-commerce, although ByteDance is a relatively late entrant, relying on the cash cow of TikTok, its overall e-commerce strength cannot be underestimated. ByteDance currently has all the advantages in terms of people, goods and places, including traffic + products + online channels (live streaming). Especially this year due to the epidemic, live streaming has become popular in the entire industry. No matter how long the boom period lasts, with ByteDance's current monetization efficiency, there is indeed a lot of room for imagination in the e-commerce field.

After talking about ByteDance’s e-commerce map, let’s talk about direct-operated e-commerce. The direct-operated e-commerce market has grown significantly in recent years. However, in October of this year, Luban raised the threshold, which caused widespread impact in the industry. Not only Luban, but also direct-operated e-commerce platforms such as Tencent Maple Leaf, Baidu Dudian and Kuaishou Jinniu have made many upgrades and adjustments to their promotional products at the end of the year. On the one hand, these adjustments have further standardized the entry threshold and industry standards for second-tier e-commerce. On the other hand, it has become increasingly difficult for small and medium-sized enterprises to engage in second-tier e-commerce, with dividends declining, and transformation becoming a must for a "second start"!

Similar to direct-operated e-commerce, this year's WeChat follower-adding system has also caused many industry practitioners to complain bitterly. On the one hand, advertising platforms are constantly strengthening supervision and unprecedentedly increasing the review and processing of the model of adding fans; on the other hand, the WeChat ecosystem has imposed many restrictions on personal WeChat accounts. The current customer acquisition cost of adding fans has doubled or even several times compared to a few years ago. Moreover, in terms of account opening, the thresholds of major platforms are now stricter. In the second half of the year, ByteDance closed down the "trapped accounts" of some industries.

In the middle of this year, Qutoutiao was exposed by the 3.15 Gala. The weight loss and online earning ads on its platform attracted industry attention. Later, Qutoutiao officials claimed that they would seriously rectify the situation...

In short, in 2020, whether it is Party A or Party B, whether it is the upstream media or the downstream advertisers, they are all experiencing four states - stricter supervision, higher costs, less traffic and more difficult results. On the road to promotion, there is no hardest, only harder. This also tells practitioners that only by constantly changing themselves and learning can they survive in the fierce competition.

4. Under the influence of the epidemic, new ecosystems such as live streaming, selling goods, online education, and cloud services have developed rapidly

Under the influence of this year's epidemic, the traffic market has also spawned many new business formats. The most eye-catching ones are: live streaming, product promotion, online education, and cloud services. Live streaming has been around for a long time, but live streaming + show + selling goods is the new ecology after the epidemic.

Through the combination of short videos and live broadcasts, the concept of live streaming with goods has become popular in the entire industry this year. The people who bring goods range from entertainment stars to ordinary people, from government officials to well-known entrepreneurs, from internet celebrities to big Vs in niche fields, all of them are promoting products in this way to achieve the goal of bringing goods. ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, and even Baidu, which has always been "uninterested" in live streaming, are actively returning to the live streaming track. In the market that Internet giants are competing for, as long as you can find the "way", you can be the first to try it out. Live streaming sales will be the major direction for e-commerce platforms to continue to monetize in the next few years.

Similar to live streaming sales, online education and cloud services have also developed rapidly this year. Online education, especially K12 education, has become a hot stock, and giants have poured in; cloud conferences, cloud offices, cloud services and other cloud + life/office concepts have also become the focus of media attention. From a market perspective, these are all new business models. In terms of mobile Internet traffic, these are incremental areas that are worth understanding and studying.

In terms of live broadcast promotion, Douyin launched live broadcast room promotion, namely feed flow, this year. Feed is different from Dou+. It is a "paid promotion tool for live broadcast rooms" launched by Douyin in April this year, based on the advertising delivery system of Bytedance. Directly presenting the live broadcast room promoted by the customer to users on the recommendation page of Douyin is a live broadcast room promotion model that introduces vertical traffic to the live broadcast room of the account that sells goods. The promotion plan is Douyin account promotion + native live broadcast room, which aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of advertising delivery.

In the field of live streaming advertising promotion, ByteDance has currently established a relatively complete advertising system, and is already ahead of the industry. Judging from the current development, there are still many opportunities and dividends. It is a channel that marketers, especially e-commerce people, need to explore in depth.

New incremental platforms or products are where there are still traffic dividends. For those working in the advertising industry, these traffic dividends must not be lost if they want to deepen their marketing and achieve breakthroughs in performance. Whether it is short videos or live streaming, whether it is live broadcast room promotion or IoT advertising, they are all hot spots, and hot spots also mean huge potential business opportunities and marketing value. This is an opportunity that marketers cannot miss.

V. Conclusion

Faced with a more complex traffic situation and more difficult to control effects in 2021, as an industry practitioner, my personal opinion is that the most important thing is to improve yourself. In particular, we must keep pace with the times and continue learning. A blacksmith must be strong himself, and only by constantly improving himself can he defeat the market.

As far as promotion is concerned, the combination of search + information flow, manual adjustment + intelligent adjustment, this will be the long-lasting main theme in the future. For the workplace changes in 2021, we need to shift from extensive thinking to refined delivery, from adjusting words and prices to page planning, from multi-channel cultivation to deep cultivation of the main channels, and from controlling costs to improving conversion rates. Follow the trend to learn and work hard to execute, and you will definitely not go wrong.

Promotion is difficult, but there are still people who do it well and who can summarize many methods. All we have to do is learn and execute. Finally, ask for advice and learn from people around you or in the same circle. If you don’t learn, you will stagnate; if you don’t execute, no matter how much you know, it will be useless. With learning and practice, I believe you can calmly face greater challenges in the future.

Author: Mubibai

Source: Aichi SEM (CMOcollege)