The toutiao advertising system was launched in mid-2014, supporting toutiao’s advertising sales of 15 billion yuan in 2017, and will support Toutiao’s advertising sales of 45 billion to 50 billion yuan in 2018.

There are three participants in advertising activities, namely, advertisement, user and scene. In Toutiao, the advertising position (the X on one page is advertisement), context and other scenes are determined by the platform. Advertisers mainly set the content related to the two subjects of advertisement and user through DSP.

As mentioned in the first chapter, the whole programmatic advertising involves the division of labor and cooperation of SSP, ADX, DSP, DMP and other platforms. Media party docking the multiple ADX, advertising network, etc., equivalent to give them to sell advertising space, itself have direct sales brand advertising, will need to estimate the wide eCPM (value is expected to show one thousand, equal to click click the X value, on behalf of the forecast earnings), choose the highest advertising display, this scheme is called dynamic allocation, the dynamic allocation of traffic, The product form is supplier platform SSP. ADX, an advertising trading platform, is responsible for selling media traffic to DSP in the form of bidding. Generally, IT conducts CPM settlement with DSP, and the estimation of click-through rate is mainly completed by THE DSP with more connected data. Therefore, it is very reasonable to use CPM settlement that does not involve click-through rate. Docking with the ADX, responsible for the use of RTB way to buy advertising product shape is the demand of DSP platform, is the main port of advertising, DSP and advertisers have a variety of the method of payment, mainly to make money with advertisers settlement and and the settlement difference between the ADX, so have higher request for bid and orientation, offer ways to compute the advertising side of both click and click value, Bid again under budget constraints.

Today’s headline DSP platform (DSPS) on the surface features of it include business, foundation, five modules, data, tools, tutorials, represented by function of advertising is the core of business module, represented by account financial news system module is the basis of the service for the whole system, is given priority to with all kinds of report data module to provide data support for the business, The tool module with directional creative optimization plan and other functions provides additional assistance for business, and the tutorial module with Today School as its main function provides guidance and answers questions for system operation.

The basic information

role

Headlines headlines DSP is today the demand advertising platform (ad.toutiao.com), which is the main channel to today’s headlines advertising, advertising is the main customer, namely the demand side, including advertisers, sales, agency, AD optimization, etc., regardless of the optimized division sales, agency, or advertisements are in the service of the advertisers. (PS: agents and sales will own another background, convenient management of the following customers and advertising, etc.)

Toutiao’s sales structure is divided into three parts — KA (Key Account), LA (Local Account) and SMB (Small and Midsize Business). Refers to sme customers); The agency company acts as an agent for toutiao’s advertising products to serve its customers. The advertising optimizer understands the advertising release and improves the advertising effect by improving the release plan. Each branch of SMB Toutiao will allocate 3 to 4 optimizers for each industry to assist customers in the background release.

Toutiao wants fewer agents and AD optimizers. In the early stage, the agency saved the cost of educating customers and attracted local customer resources. More than a year later, Toutiao began to terminate the contract with the agency and adopt the direct business model. The re-purchase rate of Toutiao’s advertisements is high, and the reduction of agents can obtain more income. AD optimization division just because of the existence of professional advertising and advertising system the familiarity of the threshold is higher, but the follow-up of today’s headlines by enhancing advertising system operability, reduce the threshold of the advertising, promotion effect by improving the algorithm, greatly improve old customers continue to rate, to understand the needs of sales can undertake the task of advertising. (PS: It can be seen that the AD optimizer is in an awkward position with a single media side, but knowledge of multiple AD/traffic acquisition platforms is the core competency of the AD optimizer.)

Advertising location, material type and payment method

Advertising position, material type and payment method are three conditions closely related to advertising products, which respectively determine the display scene, display form and how to charge the advertising. These three are varied in Internet advertisements, and are mainly shown as the following in today’s toutiao.

Advertising position: Information Union opening screen, Information Union information flow, Toutiao News flow, Toutiao Details page, Toutiao Opening screen, Connotation duan Zi opening screen, connotation Duan Zi information flow, volcano video information flow, Douyin information flow, watermelon video information flow (PS: to say goodbye to connotation Duan zi ~)

Material type: vertical version video, horizontal version video, vertical version big picture, horizontal version big picture, small picture, group picture, GIF

Material types supported by different advertising Spaces under bidding advertising (material types are closely related to advertising space scenes)

Payment method: CPT GD CPC CPM CPV

CPT: The CPT in toutiao refers to Cost Per Time, which covers a certain period of Time for a certain advertising space

GD: Guarentee Delivery is advertising with guaranteed quantity. According to CPM pricing, the media will guarantee the demand side (advertisers, etc.) to reach a certain quantity

CPV: Cost Per View, which is calculated by the number of ads played for 10S. That is, a user who watches an advertisement video for 10S counts as one CPV

Headline advertising products

Toutiao DSP advertising products include: open screen advertising, information flow advertising, open screen broadcast, video advertising, information alliance. An advertising product contains advertising position, material form and payment method. Different combinations of advertising position and material form will appear many advertising products, so that sales and customers have no way to start. Therefore, several characteristic advertising products are proposed to be packaged for sale, which is especially beneficial to customers’ communication and understanding after commercialization.

In fact, at the system level and in the delivery process, there is no essential difference between different advertising products. However, when setting up advertising groups, advertising plans and ideas in the delivery process, different Settings can combine different advertising products. For example, open screen broadcast advertising products, “information alliance” is selected in the “range” of advertising plan, and “open screen” is selected in the “creative materials” of creativity.



Opening the advertisingOpen screen advertisement is a form of advertisement that is loaded when the application is started, displayed for a fixed time (static 3 seconds, dynamic 4 seconds, video 5 seconds), and automatically closed after the display and entered the main page of the application.

Advertising position: mainly including the opening screen of the headline, the opening screen of the paragraph, the opening screen of the headline video; Sales methods: CPT and GD sales methods are supported for toutiao screen and Toutiao video screen. Section screen support CPT sales

Information stream advertising



News feed ads are native ads that let users read ads as if they were consulting. Better results can be achieved if the AD is combined with the user and the scene.

Advertising position: recommended channel, local channel, video channel, segment information stream

Format: large picture, small picture, group picture, video (within 10 minutes)

Promotion purpose: landing page, app download, phone calls, headlines, etc

Payment method: CPT GD CPC CPM

Opening the broadcast



Use the resources of the information alliance to distribute advertisers’ ads to the open screen of the application in the information alliance, strong exposure, and a wider coverage, suitable for brand launching.

Payment method: CPT CPC CPM

Video advertising



Video advertisement A video is more attractive than a picture or text to show the form, but the production cost is higher.

Advertisement position: open screen video, information stream video, details page video

Format: large picture, small picture, group picture, video (within 10 minutes)

Promotion purpose: landing page, app download, phone calls, headlines, etc

Payment method: CPT GD CPC CPM CPV

Information alliance

Toutiao cooperates with various mobile phone manufacturers and well-known apps to export information content as well as advertising, similar to an advertising alliance. That is to say, inserting ads into the headlines news stream of other apps cooperating with Toutiao is basically the same as news stream ads, which is suitable for scale effect.

The main features

After the introduction of basic information, we will first summarize the characteristics of Toutiao DSP. These characteristics may not be felt in the subsequent functional product analysis, so we will write them in the front.

• Update and iterate quickly

Toutiao’s DSPwas launched in the middle of 2014, and it was updated once every five days on average. There were more than 240 updates in the news, indicating its rapid iteration. Rapidly expanded functions to business, basic, data, tools, tutorial five modules, and derived CRM, website building, DMP and other sub-systems, providing product support for business development, through the function to improve the advertising effect of customer renewal is greatly helpful. In contrast, Tencent’s DSP product iteration of social advertising is very slow, perhaps because the integration of advertising space of different business divisions has consumed most of the energy.

But in the rapid update iteration, also exposed a problem – chaos. The interaction design is messy, with two things in different places having different interaction styles. There are many names for the same thing.



The problem of “chaos” has been much better after several iterations in February and March, and for 2B products such as advertising products, the most important thing is commercial value such as effect, rather than interactive nouns and other things. Despite the flaws, toutiao DSP is still a very good product, worth learning.

• Is to show the original is intended to be original

Information flow advertising is native advertising, and toutiao information flow advertising as one of the best, is to show the original and original intention to play incisively and vividly.

Show the native

GIF GIF ads only have content section, because GIF GIF is very consistent with the tonality of content section. Only horizontal and vertical videos can be displayed in Douyin, in the hope that the user experience of Douyin will not be damaged at the beginning. These two videos are also more in line with the tonality of Douyin. These are the embodiment of showing the original.

Intention of native

The performance of intention native in Toutiao is mainly crowd orientation technology. The product carrying this technology is DMP (data management platform), and the user labels in DMP are all from the recommendation system of Toutiao. Mining user tags based on content analysis is the cornerstone of recommendation system, and user tags can be applied in DMP. (PS: Toutiao’s ADX and DMP are also associated, so its ADX can output estimated CTR information to the docking DSP.)

DMP is mainly used to do crowd calculation, advertisers can be calculated for the crowd. In addition to DMP, there is also a simpler target group setting in the advertising plan setting.

DMP data management platform

DMP includes two functions, crowd management and label management, covering demand side data, advertising effect data and media side data. Create crowd package in crowd management, and merge, cross and exclude the crowd. The crowd package has three sources. One is to upload the crowd package actively, encrypting the IMEI, IDFA and mobile phone number of the crowd to DMP, which is the demand side data. The second is the rule crowd package, set a rule for advertising, industry, creativity, find these interested in the crowd, is the advertising effect data; The third is the label generated by select tag crowd, label including the application of directional label (install some applications), the headline number fans label (headline is some fans), geographic location labels (car, travel, education), are today’s headlines on your platform unearthed, is the media data.



Whether it is geographic location label in DMP, interest classification and keywords in advertising plan setting, or all kinds of creative word packages, they are all closely related to the recommendation system of Toutiao. Toutiao’s recommendation system mining user tags based on content analysis is the cornerstone of the recommendation system, and user tags can be applied to DMP.

Recommendation system

Recommendation system, in essence, to solve the content and user, scene matching, just like computing advertising, in essence to solve the advertising and user, scene matching (the core problem has been mentioned in the last article). Fitting a function of user satisfaction with content requires variables of three dimensions xi user, XU scene and XC content, function y=F(XI, XU, XC), which is a classic supervised learning problem.

At the model level, the same powerful algorithmic recommendation system is used, but the model architecture will be adjusted according to different business scenarios. At the feature level, there are mainly four features that have an impact on the recommendation system, namely, correlation feature (whether the attributes of the evaluation content match with users), environmental feature (geographical location, time, etc.), heat feature (global heat, classification heat, etc.) and collaborative feature (collaborative recommendation for similar users). There are many features related to content and user interests. Where do these features come from? From text analysis, video analysis, picture analysis.

Text analysis has three main application directions: user interest modeling, auxiliary content recommendation and channel content generation. Through text analysis, text features are mined, including explicit semantic tags and implicit semantic features. Explicit semantic labels are defined by people, and each label has a clear meaning. They are used for user portrait, channel content filtering, recommendation recall, and recommendation features. They require full coverage and low accuracy. Implicit semantic features, including topic features and keyword features. Topic features belong to the conceptual system and describe the probability distribution of words without clear meaning. They are used to filter channel content, label search, recommend recall, and do not require full coverage. They are responsible for accurate and abstract expression. Keyword features belong to the entity system, which is a description based on unified features without a clear set. They are also used to filter channel content, tag search and recommend recall, as long as the popular entities in each field are covered.



• Premium traffic bidding, not residual traffic bidding

Both non-programmatic and programmatic advertising in Toutiao are likely to win high-quality traffic of Toutiao. Many students will have a question, Toutiao DSP already support RTB, GD, CPT and other modes, why we still emphasize that each mode is equal, is it generally these several are not equal?

In fact, in most media these are not equal, and there is a priority between transaction modes. First of all, I want to popularize the knowledge of transaction mode. In the first chapter of the series, Vency only said that programed advertising includes RTB, PA, PDB, PD and other forms, without specific features of each, so I will talk about it in detail. The trading mode among RTB, PA, PDB and PD is mainly different from whether the quantity is guaranteed and whether the price is guaranteed. The quantity is guaranteed, while the price is negotiated and traded at a fixed price, as shown in the following table.

Several advertising model which can be seen, the price, the higher the advertisers and the higher barriers to entry, required insurance benefits for advertisers and the better, the scale and quality of advertisers is also higher, more brand advertisers, followed after all brand advertising marketing plan as early as six months or a year plan can not participate in the bid may be less than the RTB mode, etc. And ultimately, what happens is that the people who participate in RTB are the ones who pick the tail.

Toutiao is equivalent to putting high-quality traffic on the market so that all kinds of advertising models can bid, there is no priority traffic to who said. Of course, there may be tweaking algorithms that give higher priority so that their ECPMs are slightly higher, giving them a slight advantage.

• The flagship oCPC pricing and payment model

In the introduction of various platforms above, IT is specially emphasized that DSP makes money by price difference, accurately estimates eCPM, and can obtain profit margin according to eCPM bid. DSP not only calculates the click rate and click value of advertising side in bidding, but also makes bids under budget constraints. If the advertiser chooses CPC and CPA, the system will convert it to eCPM for bid, eCPM=1000XpCTRXCPC=1000XpCTRXpCVRXCPA, where pCTR refers to expected click-through rate (clicks/views) and pCVR refers to expected conversion rate (conversions/clicks).

What’s the oCPC headline? Optimized Cost Per Click, where the system delivers ads to the users who are most likely to convert, and ultimately pays Per Click. For advertisers, oCPC’s conversion rate is definitely higher than CPC’s under the same pricing method, because CPC doesn’t take into account subsequent conversion. OCPC, which is open to all advertisers, is significantly more advantageous than CPA, which is open only to SMBS (small and medium customers). For Toutiao, the more accurate the evaluation, the higher the conversion rate, the better, the most suitable traffic to the most suitable advertising, to achieve the optimal platform.

reference

“Exclusive survey | technology company B Side: how today’s headlines with sales of 10000 45 billion yuan into advertising KPI”

www.yicai.com/news/541218…

36 kr start | headlines today recommendation algorithm principle, the full explanation

36 kr.com/coop/toutia…

Depth resolution oCPC, look at this one is enough | product manager, said

Mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6JJ8imWGQ…

Liu Peng, Wang Chao, Computational Advertising

Liang Lili programmatic Advertising · Personalized Precise Delivery Practical Manual