Last Updated on April 24, 2023
It’s nice to have you back! If you’re reading this, you’re interested in advertising on WeChat and have therefore read our 3 previous advertisement guides before landing here. If not, I strongly suggest that you check them out if you’d prefer to advertise directly through the Moments feed, get to know the power of key opinion leaders or learn about Coupon ads.
Anyway, getting back on topic, the following article will take a deeper look at WeChat’s first-released advertising format, public account ads. We’ll start off with a brief introduction that will take you through the main characteristics of public account ads, the requirements publishers need to fulfill in order to display them and the targeting options offered to both advertisers and publishers. We’ll then move on to the different types of public account ads you can choose from before concluding with some hands on tips on how to launch them.
For those of you who like to read our weekly posts but don’t have a particular interest in WeChat ads, rest assured as we’ll be moving on to new material next week!
Part 4 of the ultimate guide to WeChat ads can officially begin.
1) Introducing WeChat Public Account Ads
So let’s start off with the basics. Before we can go any further, it’s important to understand that only service and subscription accounts can buy or display public account ads.
What’s the difference between service and subscription accounts?
As a reminder, service accounts can receive payments through WeChat and are reserved to companies only while subscription accounts mainly create and share content to engage audiences. For instance, the Sekkei account through which you accessed this article is a subscription account as we use it to share content rather than sell services through the WeChat platform.
There are many other differences between service and subscription accounts but we’ll leave that topic for another day.
So how does it work?
The ads themselves can be sorted into 4 different categories (that we’ll detail in part 2) and appear at the bottom of WeChat posts published by other public accounts as illustrated in the image below.
Any verified public account can sign up to be an advertiser and start launching advertisements. Those launched ads appear at the bottom of posts published by public accounts that fulfill WeChat’s publisher requirements, provided that the advertiser and publisher have complimentary targeting preferences. Advertisers pay on a CPC basis and the revenue generated from these clicks is split between Tencent and the publisher.
What requirements must publishers fulfill to display ads?
Would-be publishers with protected content (meaning that they regularly publish original content) require at least 10,000 followers to display ads while public accounts with unprotected content need at least 20,000 followers.
What targeting options are available to advertisers and publishers?
Publishers can select which advertisers they’re willing to work with based on their industry while advertisers can also choose which accounts they want to advertise through according to the same criteria. In addition, advertisers can specify the users they wish to target based on demographic variables such as gender, age, location and personal interests.
2) Types of WeChat Public Account Ads
WeChat public account ads can be sorted into 4 separate categories:
- Public account ads
- App download ads
- Brand activity ads
- Coupon ads
Each type of ad can have one or more promotion purposes. For example, public account ads obviously promote your brand’s WeChat account but not only. To a certain extent, they also promote your brand.
Likewise, brand activity ads can be used to give exposure to your brand, a specific activity or your online store. The different promotion purposes these ad types serve can be sorted into 6 groups as illustrated below.
Understanding the different purposes of each ad type is good and all but what we really want is concrete examples of these ads, right? Below you will find some actual screenshots to give you a better idea of what we’re talking about.
3) How to launch WeChat Public Account Ads
STEP 1: LOG IN TO THE WECHAT BACKEND
STEP 2: CLICK ON THE OFFICIAL ACCOUNT BUTTON
STEP 3: WRITE AD NAME AND CHOOSE AD TYPE
STEP 4: SELECT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
STEP 5: SET LAUNCH TIME AND BIDDING PRICE
STEP 6: UPLOAD AD IMAGE AND INPUT AD COPY
STEP 7: DOUBLE-CHECK THE AD AND SUBMIT!
STEP 8: USE AD DASHBOARD TO MONITOR PERFORMANCE
There you have it! By now you should be an expert in WeChat advertisements and hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading our guides as much as we’ve enjoyed writing them. And that’s all folks!
Be sure to come back next week for more digital news!
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