A guide to operating an advertising budget of 10 million+!

This title is really not a clickbait title. In fact, many people think that what we do when we make investments is just spending money, but how to spend the money well and how to improve the input-output ratio is a very learned matter.

Before, my daily work in advertising was to follow up with clients who had already been advertised, remove and remove advertising materials/exclusive tracking links, monitor whether the data was within the client’s budget (if the conversion rate was low, it would be suspended in time/to avoid client losses), issue contracts and invoices, and other trivial matters.

After becoming familiar with the entire delivery process, I began to learn about data analysis, user profiling, etc., and took the initiative to find more matching channels for customers to connect and create more revenue.

After gaining more experience, we can also provide some creative optimization suggestions for the client’s product landing page (usually a mini program or H5) to help the client improve the traffic conversion rate, so that the client can invest more advertising fees.

Recently, we have even started to provide customers with: operating personal accounts and communities on their behalf, helping customers improve the back-end monetization conversion rate, and thereby increase advertising revenue.

After a year of accumulation, I have gone from being a newbie responsible for simple docking of the section to a business operator responsible for the department's revenue.

Therefore, this article is to share with you some of my thoughts on the traffic delivery business over the past year, and to share with newbies like me who have entered this industry from scratch, hoping to grow together with you.

1. Correct Values

Responsible for traffic delivery, clients often have budgets of several million or even tens of millions. If the values ​​of the cooperating parties are not right, it is easy for tricks to happen: channel inflating, agent deductions, business rebates, which can easily ruin the company's reputation.

Therefore , all companies should have a cornerstone value: altruism. Only with extreme altruism can one achieve "self-interest" and create lasting value. (Here we recommend one of our must-read books, "The Way of Life")

I didn’t understand it at first, but after experiencing a lot of grievances and touching moments, I began to empathize with them more and more.

We previously worked with an e-commerce sponsor with sufficient budget. Although he was not short of money, he also had high control over channel quality. For the first test in an unfamiliar channel, we hope to keep the cost within a few thousand yuan.

However, high-quality channels basically have no shortage of customers and have their own investment thresholds. Customers’ requirements are inconsistent with the channel’s thresholds, and both sides are very strong, so it is difficult to operate in the middle.

But the boss led us to first propose optimization plans for the delivery pages to customers, so that we can better undertake the traffic of the channels (for free). On the other hand, the middlemen do not make a profit from the price difference, and first make an advance payment to the channel/agree that if the amount is not used up, it will be used for other customers next time.

After nearly 10 meetings, we finally successfully put the optimized landing page online for testing. The data met customer expectations, and we have formed a long-term cooperation since then.

I would also like to thank all the channel partners who have cooperated with us and appreciate your support!

In addition to big sponsors, we have also worked with many startups or innovation departments of large companies that have limited budgets and only a little funding left and want to make a comeback.

During the docking process, I can feel their anxiety: they don’t know whether their products are suitable for launch, and whether there will be any pitfalls in the channel?

We share our advertising experience and information on channel conversion rates with each other free of charge; we often dissuade clients from spending money on advertising.

A common saying in advertising is "I know that half of the budget is wasted, but I don't know which half."

Many times our customers are under tremendous financial pressure and want to open up a market for their products, but the risks are also great.

What I hope and can do is to try my best to help clients reduce the wasted part of their budget.

2. Customer acquisition strategy of the traffic department

For the second-party company, "Where are the wealthy customers?" is an eternal question to think about.

After we set goals for everyone in our department, I became very anxious. The first thing I thought about every day when I woke up was how to achieve this month's goals.

The completion of the goal is positively correlated with the number of "newly added customers". Therefore, we made many attempts in customer acquisition strategies and also fell into many serious traps.

1. First time stepping into the pit

We have envisioned a demand funnel for market/operation/marketing practitioners: everyone must read "content information" every day to supplement their knowledge, then connect with people in the group to seek "cross-industry cooperation"/"traffic mutual promotion", then spend money on advertising, and finally some people will need to buy "customized marketing/operation plans"

Based on the idea that the demand for "mutual traffic promotion" is above the demand funnel of "buying traffic", we invested two technical guys and launched the "Zero One Exchange Assistant" applet in February 2019.

But after nearly 2-3 months of promotion, we pulled out the data and compared it with the previously envisioned business funnel, and found that the gap between the harsh reality and the ideal was very large.

However, we found that although this part of the customers can indeed be funneled into paying customers, the revenue brought to our business line did not increase proportionally. From our subsequent review data, 70% of the customers in the funnel could only bring us less than 15% of the revenue.

Therefore, when we review the results, we know that most of the customer products that enter the traffic exchange platform are actually in the cold start stage, and they hope to have a few hundred matching traffic to test the product data performance.

For big customers who "spend money to buy traffic", there is only one requirement: how to spend money more efficiently. Spend money on standardized traffic from Guangdiantong/Douyin/Kuaishou, spend money on non-standard traffic from public accounts, spend money on incentive traffic...

The feeling I got from this pitfall is that using experience and knowledge to make decisions during exploration is actually very similar to the double-blind test in the pharmaceutical industry: before the actual data results come out, it is difficult to find the problematic part of the decision-making logic, even if it is so obvious in hindsight.

2. Fight harder and harder

While we were experiencing the pitfalls of our customer acquisition strategy, our advertising cooperation with some major customers was also progressing, which supplemented our understanding of "user (people who spend money on advertising) needs", so we adjusted the funnel design:

(1) Dig deep into the different levels of traffic demands of an industry or a customer and provide effective solutions

(2) Migrate and reuse the “traffic solution” of this industry to other relatively backward industries (information gap)

Generally speaking, the most abundant, easiest to obtain, and cheapest traffic on the market is "incentive traffic" (definition: an online part-time job where you get paid to complete tasks), but this type of traffic will not bring much conversion effect except for making your "user data" look good.

The second is the natural conversion volume . Each company opens advertising space on its own official account, mini-program, and app platform. A certain proportion of users see the advertising space and click to enter the advertising landing page.

As long as the user portrait matches and the product path is not too bad, the conversion quality of this type of traffic is OK, and can basically outperform the average customer acquisition cost of the product. However, it is easy to reach a ceiling in terms of scale (because the number of fans of each account is limited) , which also requires us to find many similar channels and win by quantity.

The next is the advertising alliance platform , such as Tencent Guangdiantong and Toutiao’s Pangolin platform. The conversion quality of this type of traffic can also be relatively matched, and the scale can also be very large.

Finally, there is the traffic settled based on transactions (abbreviated as cps in the industry), which can be directly responsible for order revenue. Customers who have used it say they like it. But the reality is that it costs money for channel owners to maintain daily traffic and operations. When encountering products with poor conversion rates, the channels often gain nothing. Therefore, there are not many channels in the entire traffic market that can cooperate based on CPS.

However, the marketing strategies and customer acquisition costs vary greatly among different industries.

If you want to become an ad operator who is capable of operating across various industries, the three abilities of information collection, path optimization for new users, and design of ad materials are essential. Otherwise, your ad costs may be several times higher than others.

Because only if you can find more accurate traffic earlier (so in this industry/information is money), you can get more accurate users at a lower cost.

For example, the competition in the K12 industry is already fierce. Everyone has the above three abilities. If you want to win over others, you have to start learning the fourth ability: how to operate traffic and increase the payment rate.

Therefore, the K12 industry is now starting to add users to personal accounts/WeChat groups (private domain traffic) and design subsequent conversion operations. As the number of times these traffic can be repeatedly reached and the number of touchpoints increase, a relatively ideal conversion rate can be achieved.

Taking the insurance industry as an example, we generally start from the natural conversion volume and look at the overall user performance data of the product; only after the delivery materials and user conversion paths are fully optimized, we consider the delivery on the aggregation platform for scale increment.

Conversion is an important data item in the delivery indicators . We would recommend designing a corresponding traffic conversion closed loop in the product to increase the frequency and touch points of traffic.

At the same time, establish a complete follow-up lead or private domain personal account operation and conversion system . It is not an immediate effect action, but in the long run, it is very worthwhile to do.

The same goes for the optimization solutions for customer acquisition in the e-commerce and K12 industries. Only by helping customers penetrate the traffic conversion effects and models at every level can we truly reduce traffic costs.

3. Continuous iteration

Because the newly formulated operational strategy of "deepening the traffic demands of an industry/a customer at different levels" was effective, and the revenue and number of customers grew very fast, we began to pilot "the migration and reuse of the "traffic solution" of one industry to other relatively backward industries (information gap)"

I started a new journey of stepping on pitfalls: As the saying goes, "Women are afraid of marrying the wrong man, and men are afraid of entering the wrong industry." Because the customer acquisition costs and monetization efficiency of different industries are different, the gross profit margins that can be contributed to us are also different. For example, I spend half of my time on customers in the "life service" industry, but the monetization efficiency I bring is not as good as that of finance, e-commerce and other industries where I only spend 10% of my time.

We thought that we could solve this problem by changing industries, but later, we found that each industry has its own investment cycle . For example, the recruitment industry is the "golden March and silver April", the real estate industry is the "golden September and silver October", and banks can complete 50% of the annual performance with a "good start" in March, and so on. Just because an industry does not make money in March does not mean that it will not make money later. Therefore, we need to have insight into the rules of various industries in advance so that we can design the operation rhythm more systematically.

After completing the journey from 0 to 1, how do we expand our achievements? Wait for my 2020 year-end review~

IV. Guide to management and avoidance of pitfalls in the delivery process

After working in traffic distribution for a long time, I found that the world is seriously polarized: wealthy customers are extremely wealthy and willful, and they think that as long as they have money, they can create high-quality channels (which they really can, haha), and they prepay and recharge us in advance.

Customers without money are very frugal : invoice tax points/advance payment/account period, every link requires both parties to negotiate on the basis of trust.

After managing more than 200 investment projects, I hope to share with you some points worth learning. Many large companies actually have their own standardized investment processes, but for companies that have not yet established some investment SOPs, it may be of some reference value.

A normal and complete delivery process generally includes the following steps:

Every link will directly or indirectly affect the final delivery effect, so there is enough reason to polish every link to the extreme. If you want to have further in-depth discussions, you can add the person in charge of the launch to communicate (WeChat: lylbxzs002)

These principles are actually very easy to understand, but unfortunately, during the docking process, we still found that there are too many products that are not qualified for promotion and are looking for channels in large numbers.

Here I suggest that you refer to the simplified decomposition diagram I made below before launching, to see whether each important node has been repeatedly optimized to the extreme.

Regardless of where the traffic entrance is, users will go through two stages during the delivery process: "stimulating interest" and "generating conversions":

1. Stimulate interest stage

In the process of stimulating user interest, the display of materials determines whether it can arouse the user's attention motivation, and the simplicity of the conversion entrance determines whether the user is willing to take the next step.

Motivation: High conversion rate display materials determine user interest

So how do you create display materials with high conversion rates? We have summarized the following four elements:

01 Trust endorsement:

It is best to put a joint endorsement from the channel and the advertiser on the advertising material, because users may not recognize your advertisement, but they must trust the products of the channel itself.

02 Circle Substitution:

Every product targets a certain circle . When you specify a certain circle in the title copy, users will automatically judge whether their identity matches when browsing. From an extreme point of view, if your name is written directly on the copy, then you will most likely click in.

Similarly, if you want to promote insurance, you can mention "moms who protect their families" in the copy; if you want to promote skin care products, you can mention "girls who are becoming more beautiful."

03 Product Value:

Use the shortest possible copy to tell browsing users what value they can get by coming in. It doesn't need to be big or empty, and you can combine it with activities or benefits within the product to promote it.

04 Design illustration:

The design of the color scheme should be as eye-catching as possible, suitable for the characteristics of this age group, and some dynamic effects to guide clicks should be added as appropriate. Our company previously designed a tool. In order to support their respective positions on button colors, the product manager and designer separately consulted a large number of articles and data to make their case, and finally solved it through AB testing.

A good design can help you get more conversions, so it is definitely worth paying attention to.

Trigger: Simple and easy-to-use conversion entrance determines user engagement

The shorter the operation process, the higher the user engagement, and the higher the conversion rate will naturally be. This is easy to understand. so:

01. If authorization can be done with one click, there is no need for users to do it manually

02. Don’t make users jump out and reenter if the task can be completed in one system

03. Don’t ask users to fill out fields if they can choose

04. Don’t postpone the value if you can postpone the user’s cost as much as possible.

Before users have trust in the value of your brand and products, it is best not to challenge their patience easily.

You must know that every time you ask users to take one more step, there will be a higher churn rate. Therefore, it is necessary to put value first to let users better understand your value, and to put user costs later, namely, to put steps that require users to spend too much energy. If you want to have in-depth communication, you can add the person in charge of the delivery to communicate.

We once had a client who simply made a one-click authorization adjustment in the mobile phone number authorization step according to our optimization solution recommendations, and the authorization loss rate was reduced by 65% . For a traffic volume of tens of thousands, it is likely that nearly a hundred orders were saved.

2. Generate conversion stage

In the conversion stage of traffic delivery, the quality of the design of the user activation, conversion, retention, and repurchase paths determines the subsequent user LTV.

Activation during traffic delivery:

When users successfully enter our advertising products, they can be distinguished from the display pages of frequent users. In order to better activate users, we can set up some specific pop-up welfare activities based on channel links to guide users to have a preliminary understanding of the products; the design of the activation path can reduce the bounce rate of users after entering the product in the first conversion funnel.

Conversion during traffic delivery:

In the conversion phase, it is highly recommended to determine a first-purchase sku . Many of our customers offer users more than 100 options when launching products, which actually makes users run away after having no choice.

Users’ payment habits on a new platform are not formed overnight, so it is necessary to recommend a first-purchase product that fits the platform to help them overcome the psychological threshold of the first payment, so that the subsequent secondary payment conversion rate will be higher.

For a snack mini-program e-commerce client we helped launch before, we designed an activity path that only promoted a hot-selling cake at a promotional price and 5 activities to attract new users to place orders after the user entered the homepage. In the end, the rate of mobile phone number authorization to first order payment was 13%, and an average of 5 new users were brought in .

For sku selection:

01. If you don’t have a first-purchase product, it is recommended to create one

02. Universally applicable, preferably just in need

03. The unit price is low, so make appropriate concessions

04. It can highlight the characteristics of the platform to a certain extent

Retention during traffic delivery:

Although it is easy to get traffic, if there is no complete path design, 80% of it is often one-time. Therefore, after the user comes, the design of the retention link is also very important, which can greatly save the cost of traffic acquisition.

There are currently three common paths in retention design:

01. Design a closed flow loop

02. Design a recall mechanism

03. Design an incentive system

As the publisher, we generally recommend optimizing the relatively easy-to-use closed-loop traffic design and recall mechanism . The incentive system requires a design process from shallow to deep, and the user's susceptibility is generally delayed. In other words, if the incentive system is well designed, it will play a greater retention role in the later stage, while the first two actions can immediately obtain the maximum retention feedback.

For example, a young two-dimensional product that we helped Huang Xiaowu’s team launch exceeded 1 million PVs 5 hours after it went online, and reached 4 million PVs in 24 hours.

The real nicknames of the messages received by the questioner from two friends are displayed in the mini program. From the third message onwards, only the message content can be seen. If you want to see the message creators, you can go to the app to check. This clever combination of young people's curiosity directs traffic to the app and achieves traffic retention. Therefore, the traffic retention closed loop can be reasonably designed within the official accounts, personal accounts, communities, and app systems.

At this point, in a relatively complete traffic delivery process, the user conversion path can be broken down more clearly, so that the traffic obtained from subsequent promotions will not be lost or wasted too much.

3. Some thoughts on traffic

01. There are real people behind the traffic. You can empathize with them as if they were your friends: what they think when they see the page, not just a number or probability, determines the efficiency of your traffic utilization;

02. Direct and seamless vertical precise traffic is rare or non-existent. Since my traffic is vertically targeted, why don’t I do conversion actions that are simpler than accumulating traffic? So don’t take the chance of skipping conversion operations and look for the so-called “precise vertical matching channels”;

03. ROI is not the result of unilateral efforts of the channel. Advertisers should work together with the channel to improve the ROI of product delivery.

04. Where traffic gathers is where user attention gathers . With the rise and fall of platforms, user attention will also fluctuate, and traffic depressions and platform dividends will be generated;

05. There is no wrong traffic, only wrong scenarios.

Author: Jian Feng

Source: Jianfeng