WeChat Official Account has been officially released over 7 years since August 23, 2012. Undeniably, no matter in terms of volume or influence, it has gradually changed from the initial brutal growth into a powerful traffic platform in the new media industry of China. Almost all major events occurred recently went through the process of simmering, in-depth interpretation and spread through WeChat Official Accounts.
In the end of 2019, the number of WeChat Official Accounts maintaining updating reaches 1.756 million, with accumulative volume of 322 million articles published. According to Xiguaji Data, in 2019, the quantity of WeChat Official Account advertisements exceeded 3.28 million, 115% more than that in the second half of last year, which shows a rising performance of advertisements.
Data Source: Xiguaji Data
The WeChat Official Account does attract a group of quality content creators. “Connecting your brand to a billion users”, this slogan of Official Account also predicts accurately that there is such a group of people who can obtain fame and investment from this platform. Correspondingly, more business owners are paying attention to the traffic brought by the Official Account. Currently, since the number of truly active accounts is still limited, the advertising markets of WeChat Official Account is still oversupplying.
To solve business owners’ problems encountered during advertising on WeChat Official Account, W-axis Technology will provide integrated services for Official Account Advertising, maximizing the effectiveness of your advertisements. Before understanding the advertising rules on the platform, firstly, you need to get to know about the advertisement types on the Official Account.
I. Official Account Advertisement types
WeChat Official Account advertisement, based on the WeChat Official Account Platform, in a form similar to the contents of the Official Account articles, displays its content at five available advertising resource positions including the bottom of an article, the body of an article, Mutually-selected advertisement, video patch, and CPS (Cost Per Sale) advertisement of rebate products.
Bottom of an article:
The advertisement appears at the bottom of the Official Account’s content, supporting images and videos with an aspect ratio of 16:9. Dynamic video ads are more contagious. It can quickly grab the target audience’s attention and allow users to deepen the brand impression. Study shows that videos ads can increase brand awareness and conversion rates significantly. (Source: Nielsen’s research, “The Value of Video for Brands”, 18 Mar 2015)
The advertisement position at the bottom of the Official Account supports multiple promotion pages to meet various advertisement effects, which help advertisers achieve massive brand exposure, convey brand tone and strengthen brand image.
Body of an article:
The advertisement appears in the body of the Official Account article and it is related to the context of the article, which improves the efficiency of advertisement conversion.
Use images with an aspect ratio of 16:9 to increase advertising exposure and it is conducive to convey more product and brand information. Link the image with the landing page of a WeChat Mini Program to provide stronger conversion and precipitation capabilities.
Video patch:
The video patch advertisement appears in the content of the Official Account articles under Wi-Fi and 4G conditions. The video materials are rich in types, supporting 5 seconds of images, 6 seconds videos (cannot manually close) and 15 seconds videos (can manually close after 5 seconds). Videos tend to have better user attraction and longer advertisement viewing time. Moreover, videos are played mutely by default, which improves the user experience.
Mutually-selected advertisement:
Mutually-selected advertising is a delivery model in which advertisers and Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) on the Official Account platform mutually select each other and reach cooperation, with advertising creatives presented in an article published by the selected Official Account. Depending on the depth of cooperation, usually, there are 2 types of models: advertising recommendation and content customization. The advertisement recommendation model can cover the KOL’s fans precisely while the content customization model can further articulate the brand concept through KOL’s content re-creation and marketing campaign.
CPS advertisement of rebate products:
CPS advertising for rebate products can help advertisers promote products in the most efficient way. After the advertiser synchronizes the products in the WeChat Mini Program through the API and sets the commission ratio, the product’s advertisement will be inserted into random position of an article. When a product is sold, the advertising cost will be deduction automatically according to the commission ratio.
The rebate product advertisement is not only flexible for it may have the opportunity to appear anywhere in the context, but also effective since it links directly to the Mini Program to improve user conversion rate. This fully utilizes the strong combination of “WeChat Mini Program + Official Account”, which combines the product sales and internet traffic effectively.
2. Advantages of Official Account Advertising
Precise Advertising:
In the past 7 years, various industries that WeChat Official Accounts could link to have been filled with KOLs. For example, Gogoboi or Shiliupo in the makeup industry, Luogic in the payment of knowledge industry, Cat’s Kitchen in the food industry, etc.The Official Account advertisement, based on big data analysis of WeChat users’ behaviours, through 5 types of advertisement and the free combinations of them in multiple dimensions, reaches the target audience precisely.
Xiguaji Data: Official Accounts in 31 different industries listed
High conversion ratio:
The platform provides comprehensive and visual performance evaluation data to help us and advertisers track and analyse the statistics and optimize the conversion performance.
DMP (Data Management Platform) introduction
Close loop Ecosystem:
WeChat Official Account Platform provides a marketing solution for Official Account user acquisition or voucher and coupon distribution to meet advertisers’ different business promotion requirements. It also provides a variety of advertising types to match advertisers’ different delivery purposes.
7 major purposes listed by the platform
3.Case Study
Coca-Cola – Keyword Orientation
By setting keywords, once the corresponding keywords appeared in an Official Account article reached certain times, Coca-Cola ads would be exposed at the bottom of the article. For this time, Coca-Cola set 20 keywords related to “Avengers 4” before the movie released. As a result, Coca-Cola’s official advertising video was shown in most articles related to “Avengers 4”, reached a maximum audience as possible.
The Official Account keywords are charged by CPD (Cost Per Day). When those keywords get hot in a certain period, the advertiser will get a very high return on the effect. In this case, Coca-Cola’s advertising campaign, with the help of the ultra-high popularity of “Avengers 4”, finally achieved a brand exposure 30% more than the estimated value.
Guerlain – Content Customization model
Guerlain’s mutually-selected advertisement, cooperating with Official Accounts such as Meiya, IAMIN-RED who are KOLs in makeup industry, attracted traffics with high-quality content.
The article showed the beauty evolutionary of the brand image spokesperson “Fan Bingbing” and the excellent quality of Guerlain gemstone lipstick, coupled with real lipstick test colour pictures, which greatly enhanced the users’ interest. Moreover, the lucky draw event later attracted a large number of fans to leave messages. As a result, the total viewers of the advertisement reached 10 million + and the click rate of the advertisement on the Official Account was as high as 7.9%.
Mall of the Emirates – One click to follow banner at the bottom
The banner design was simple and clear, which could strengthen the brand impression and increase the click rate of the advertisement. One simple click on the “Follow” button to jump to the Official Account page, effectively reduced the cost for posting banner and shortened the link path.
Besides, the advertisement used keywords to the target audience and precisely delivered the ads to people who were interested in shopping in Dubai and the UAE. As a consequence, the click rate exceeded the market average rate by 36% and the cost of drawing attention was 72% lower than the industry average.
JEEP – Official Account advertisement and Moment advertisement
JEEP chose mutually-selected advertisement on the Official Account platform and cooperated with 40 KOLs among various categories such as, car, fashion, family. The advertisement showed big-size images and used stories to enhance customers’ intention to purchase the car. For WeChat Moment Platform, JEEP’s advertisement used banner type, showing videos of 3 KOLs tell their childhoods’ stories, drawing viewers’ attention and interest to strengthen the brand impression.
In the end, the advertisement reached directly to over 1 million loyal car fans through various Official Accounts and received 4.8 million views in total. The interaction rate was 15% higher than the industry average.
4. How to achieve the most cost-effective advertising
It is a fact that the WeChat Official Account Platform is getting constant innovation, showing not only more changes in the form of advertisements but also stricter control over the platform. On the other hand, the readers’ requirement for better quality content is getting higher which leads to a harder user acquisition for Official Accounts. In this case, smart advertisement deliveries seem to be the best way to attract WeChat traffic right now.
For advertisers, it would be satisfying if the cost for advertising is $1,000 but achieving a market effect of $10,000. To say that the cost-effective ratio has become a criterion for the success of Official Account advertising. However, in most cases, advertisers do not get the expecting effect from investment. Here comes the question, how to find the Official Account that could bring high exposure and high conversion ratio?
By studying the statistics of top WeChat Official Accounts among various industries and characterizing their followers into different categories, regarding the pain points advertisers are experiencing, W-axis Technology will provide solutions with our professionalism.
Official Account selection:
Among the vast amount of Official Accounts, it is not simple to identify an appropriate target for advertising delivery. An oversight of details would lead to a low return.
The focus of an Official Account is its content. Since users tend to have higher requirement for reading and an ideal Official Account owner who invests plenty of time and energy to write original articles usually have stricter control over their articles’ quality, the key point in selection would be checking high-quality original contents published by the Account and looking for related keywords in them based on your product.
Content design:
After account selection, the next step would be the advertisement content design. We will provide advertisers with different advertising plans and choose the content theme according to the tone of the product.
ROI review:
Monitor the increase in the number of views and analyse the variability of data received. Under usual circumstances, the click rate would be affected mostly by the title and the conversion rate would be affected by the content. Determine the quality of the Official Account by the overall user acquisition cost and ROI and review the advertising strategy by the conversion rate from the traffic obtained.
Although the Official Account is no longer the only choice for content entrepreneurship, not even the first choice, because of its representativeness to the Chinese Internet users, it is still a place for entrepreneurs to understand the long tail market.
To better balance the relationship between Official Account owners and advertisers, the Platform is constantly upgrading the Official Account advertisement. One month ago, by connecting the Official Account and Mini Program, advertisements could be delivered to more locations in the Official Account, Mini Program or even Mini Games.
One of the best solutions for advertising delivery is to combine the Official Account mutually-selected type ads with Moment ads. Both types have high chances to be viewed and shared, which meet the most requirement by advertisers such as improve the brand value and maximize the advertising effect. This also shows that the requirement of the ability of advertisements strategy is getting higher nowadays.
Of course, W-axis Technology can help advertisers to improve the advertising efficiency greatly with cost control. The advertisements on the WeChat Official Account Platform will create more types of advertisements and more delivery locations to meet advertisers’ requirements.
