WeChat Moment Ads: Help You Precisely Reach Your Target Audience in China

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WeChat has become the upgraded portable combination of newspaper, radio and TV of Chinese people. According to Tencent’s own statistics, by the 3rd quarter of 2017, WeChat has 963 million active users, most of whom are aging between 15-40.

WeChat’s penetration rate in Tier 1 cities has reached 93%. Besides, WeChat has also got over 20 million public accounts, with 3 billion pageviews per day. Besides, WeChat takes 25% of the online time of Chinese citizens.

Therefore,WeChat has become something that no marketers could afford to ignore, if he/she wants to market in China. Basically, WeChat Ads has following advantages:

1. massive users: covering almost all mobile Internet users in China
2. precise reach: associate tags to different audience group and push ads to only targeted audience
3. native ads: the form of WeChat Moments ads is similar to original content, reader experience is good
4. In-depth interaction: messages can be left to WeChat Moments ads
5. closed-loop marketing: suitable for the purpose of promoting WeChat public accounts, distributing vouchers, customer acquisition, etc.
6. easy to track the effect: get access to campaign results in a real-time manner, and ads creatives can be readjusted in a timely manner.

What is WeChat Moments advertising?

WeChat moment ads were launched in early 2015, when 25 brands including Coco Cola and Mercedes-Benz took part into the first testing campaign.

Even before this official launch, the WeChat “timeline” had been a target for advertising companies who relentlessly tried to find ways to access user’s Moment. They usually used forwarded message via a network of personal accounts. Digipanda’s campus media network is one example. The company created a scheme for advertising on personal Wechat Moments of hundreds of student KOLs, each with at least 500 WeChat contacts. The price of posting on individual student KOLs’ moments ranged from 25 to 70 pounds per post. However this scheme was a very manual process.

What WeChat Moment ads bring is a much more sophisticated way to reach the user timeline by directly buying access from WeChat.

Procedure of Purchasing WeChat Moment Ads

Step 1: Opening account. To do this, you need to be qualified as WeChat advertiser. This requires you to first register and verify a WeChat public account and open the advertiser function. That may take around five working days.

Step 2: Create ads: you need to create ads content, decide upon WeChat ads format, target audience, pricing model to be adopted, etc.

Step 3: Approval process: It may take up to 3 working days for you to get feedback from WeChat.

Step 4: Posting Ads on WeChat Moment

Step 5: Real time monitoring and tracking

How does it work?

WeChat Moment ads have five different formats:

1)Image & text ads: The ad can have the following component:

1. Brand name and profile image;
2. Up to 40 character ad description
3. Up to 6 pictures
4. Link to an HTML5 page or a WeChat public account article
5.  Users can interact with the ads by liking it or commenting on it.

2) Video Ads

1. Brand name and profile image;
2. Up to 40 character ad description
3. 6-15 seconds short videos
4. Link to an HTML5 page or a WeChat public account article
5. Users can interact with the ads by liking it or commenting on it

3)Basic card ads

1. Brand name and profile image;
2. Image (800*450 pixel, no more than 300K), or 6-15 seconds long short video. Click on the card ad will direct to WeChat public account article or HTML5 page.
3. Headline of promotional texts (optional)
4. Up to 30 character ad description
5. Users can interact with the ads by liking it or commenting on it

4)Card ads with options

Two buttons for different options are added to card ads, which enables interaction with target audience easier.

1. Brand name and profile image;
2. Image (800*450 pixel, no more than 300K), or 6-15 seconds long short video. Click on the card ad will direct to WeChat public account article or HTML5 page.
3. Headline of promotional texts (optional)
4. Up to 30 character ad description
5. Two buttons for different options.
6. Users can interact with the ads by liking it or commenting on it

5)@ advertiser interactive ads

1. button for @advertiser appears below link to detailed content. Users can type in comments/inquiries after click the button.
2. users’ comment: can be viewed and replied by advertiser and WeChat contacts of the user
3. Advertiser’s reply can be viewed by user and his/her WeChat contacts, user and his/her WeChat contacts can reply. Message alert for user. Advertiser can reply once to each user comment.

In May 2017, TripAdvisor launched a Moments ad, which allowed users to ask questions by leaving comments. According to an interview with SocialBeta, TripAdvisor mentioned that they had replied to several thousand comments from their target audience.

Precise Reach

You can target users according to their location, interest, age, gender, device and phone network.

Location:

Three category including Beijing&Shanghai, 35 first and second tier cities, and non-specific cities.

Since April 2017, Tencent start to offering WeChat Overseas Advertising to target Chinese travelers in 42 countries and regions:

Asia: Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Russia, Philippine, Cambodia, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, India, Indonesia

Europe: Germany, France, England, Italy, Finland, UAE, Egypt, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Morocco, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Saudi Arabian, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Spain

North America: United States, Canada, Mexico

Oceania: Australia, New Zealand

South America: Brazil, Argentina

The Chinese tourists is defined by the current location data. WeChat advertising is not open to local residents in overseas countries yet due to legal reason.

Gender & Age:

Gender and age from 5 to 60 years old

Marital Status:

Single, married, newly married or raising a kid

Education level:

PhD, master, bachelor, high school, primary school

Interest tag:

WeChat now offers business interests tags and APP interests tags. For business interests tags, there are 18 level 1 interests tags (education, travel & tourism, finance, automobile, property, household products, apparel & accessories, food & drinks, life services, business services, cosmetics, internet/electronic products, sports, healthcare, maternity and pregnancy, gaming, legal services, leisure & entertainment) and 124 level 2 interests tags. For APP interests tags, there are 10 gaming tags and 28 non-gaming tags.

How much does it cost?

Moments ads adopt the CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) pricing model. There are two purchasing schemes: scheduling and auction.

For the scheduling scheme, advertisers can schedule a fixed advertising time during the following 2 to 28 days. The price also depends on where the ad will be displayed. The minimum budget is 50,000 RMB for one advertising campaign.

For the auction scheme, it’s more suitable for advertisers who need flexible advertising times and constant optimization of the ad. It’s based on real-time bidding and the minimum budget is 1,000 RMB for one day.

CPM (cost per 1,000 impression):

City size Text & Pictures Ads CPM Video ads CPM

Core city 150 180

Large city 100 120

Others 50 60

Core cities: Beijing, Shanghai

Large cities: Guanzhou, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Suzhou, Chongqing, Nanjing, Tianjin, Xi’an, Guiyang, Changsha, Qingdao, Ningbo, Zhengzhou, Dalian, Xiamen, Jinan, Harbin, Fuzhou

Ads posting and tracking

WeChat believes 11:00 and 17:00 every day are the best time for posting WeChat Moment ads. Before posting, advertiser can send the ads to at most 50 users in the white list for pre-view.

WeChat will release campaign report within 3 working days after the campaign ends. The report will include such data as exposure, click, interaction, sharing and target audience analysis, etc.

To be summarised, WeChat Moment Ads provides UK businesses an effective way to precisely reach their target audience in China. Should you be interested in giving this new marketing tool a try, or should you have any more inquiries, please feel free to reach out to Digipanda Marketing