Advertising skills on Weibo, Momo and other information flow platforms

What is information flow advertising?

Information flow advertising, in layman's terms, refers to the advertising display business carried out by major social platforms on the feed flow.

The current mainstream information flow advertising platforms include: Tencent Guangdiantong, Sina Fanstong, Toutiao advertising platform, Momo advertising platform, etc.

Information flow advertising indicators

CTR: interaction rate, that is, the number of interactions/number of impressions of a single group of ads. The higher the interaction rate, the more interested the user is in your ad.

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions, as the name suggests, is the cost of each set of advertisements being exposed a thousand times. This indicator can reflect the approximate range of the current advertising costs in the market.

CPC: cost per click. CPC is directly related to the acquisition cost of a single activated user (CPA), so we should find ways to reduce CPC during the advertising process.

Download conversion rate: that is, the conversion rate from users clicking on ads to downloading the App. After controlling the CPC cost, we should find ways to increase the download conversion rate so as to reduce the cost of acquiring a single user (CPA).

CPA: The cost of acquiring a single activated user. The ultimate goal of advertising is to find ways to control CPA and obtain more effective users within a limited promotion budget.

User retention rate: By analyzing this data, you can work backwards to find out which ad has a higher user retention rate and continuously optimize this ad.

Exposure weight of information flow advertising platform

Every information flow advertising platform hopes to present better advertisements to its users, while at the same time hoping to gain more revenue from advertisers, so each platform tends to give more exposure to good advertising content.

So what kind of ads will get more exposure? Each platform has its own set of algorithms, but the core algorithms are basically the same: exposure weight = bid * CTR. Therefore, what advertisers can do is to find ways to increase CTR while keeping the bid no lower than the current market price, so that the ads will get more exposure.

Tips for placing information flow ads

Tip 1: Plan multiple promotion points and quickly test the effect

When it comes to advertising, I believe it’s hard for anyone to be successful every time. The way to minimize the risk is to plan a large number of promotion ideas in the early stages and test the effects quickly. Therefore, in the early stage, you can call together different colleagues to brainstorm, plan out promotion ideas of different styles, make them into promotional materials, and quickly put them online to test the effects. After each set of test ads has received about 10,000 exposures, the effectiveness of this set of advertising materials can be seen.

In 2014, I was responsible for the advertising of a travel guide app called “Chanyou Guide”. At that time, we planned many promotional ideas, including “Download Chinese subway maps of Tokyo/Seoul/New York”, “30-second travel account keeping”, “Travel voice input translation” and many other promotional ideas. We then made each idea into multiple sets of different materials, and each set of materials cost about RMB 100-200 to quickly launch online for testing. In the end, we found that the CPA cost of the “Travel voice input translation” idea was the lowest, so we continuously optimized the advertising around this idea, and eventually relied on this idea to obtain the first batch of hundreds of thousands of users.

The best set of materials tested at that time

Tip 2: Find target users and deliver targeted content

There are generally two variables in information flow advertising: one is the material, and the other is the targeted audience.

When testing and promoting ideas as mentioned in Tip 1, we keep the targeted population unchanged, generally targeting a wide range of people. After the promotion idea has been tested, we start testing to find out the group with the highest interaction rate. At this time, we need to ensure that the same set of materials are used. We can divide the broad population into several non-overlapping groups and then conduct rapid tests. For example, we can divide users into four non-overlapping user groups: male & over 35 years old, female & over 35 years old, male & under 35 years old, and female & under 35 years old. We can conduct delivery tests to find out 1-2 groups of people with higher interaction rates. After that, we can deliver these two groups in stages to prevent the materials from becoming "outdated" quickly.

When choosing a targeted audience, another trick is to combine the different functions of each platform for screening. For example, Fanstong has different functions such as "targeting fans of a certain Weibo account", and Guangdiantong has different functions such as "targeting fans of a certain type of WeChat public account".

For example, in 2014, I was responsible for the promotion of a travel tool App called "Chanyouji". Through user interviews, we analyzed which types of Weibo accounts our existing users would follow: travel Weibo (such as Qyer.com, Mianbao Travel, etc.), literary Weibo (such as micro magazines, Instagram selections, etc.), App recommendation Weibo (such as the global iPhone official website, App Dog, etc.)... We classified the Weibo accounts that these users often follow, and then launched these categories in stages. At that time, the customer acquisition cost of this method was about 50% lower than the cost of reaching a wide range of people.

Fanstong supports targeted delivery to similar fans of a certain Weibo account

Tip 3: Focus on optimizing landing pages to increase download conversion rates

In information flow advertising, reducing CPC cost to a very low level is far from enough, because our ultimate goal is to acquire enough effective users at the lowest cost, so we also need to pay attention to CPA and user retention rate.

While reducing CPC costs, we also need to find ways to increase the conversion rate of click-download activation. How can we improve it? At this time, we should focus on optimizing the details of the landing page, especially on the connection between the landing page and promotional materials. For example, the landing page for promoting an app is usually the App Store or the Android App Store, so we should work hard on the information that users see at first glance, such as the app title, app screenshots (especially the first two), and app description (especially the first paragraph).

For example, in 2014, I was responsible for the promotion of a beauty app called "Chanyou Pictorial". After testing many promotion ideas, we found that users were most interested in the "automatic wallpaper change" function, and the CPC cost was also very low. Therefore, we used this data to convince the product manager to add this function to the App. At the same time, we added keywords such as "wallpaper" to the app title in the App Store and replaced the first screenshot in the App Store with the "automatic wallpaper change" function point. In this way, users will be able to find the information point of "automatically changing wallpaper" in the entire process of "seeing promotional materials - reading application introduction - downloading and opening the App", and there will be no situation where the information is not connected, so the conversion rate will naturally not be low.

Wallpaper information of Chanyou Pictorial in the App Store introduction

Author: Aiqi Online

Source: Aichi Online