Huawei Ads review

Huawei is a global scale Chinese company known to many for its mobile products Huawei and Honor. Back in 2019, this company began to develop its own ecosystem. It removed  Google utilities from the pre-installed list of applications, replacing them with analogs of their own production. 

Since then, there have been a series of positive changes and updates - its search engine PetalSearch, its browser, several services with video and music, books, and Huawei Assistant. Who would have thought it, but even the advertising opportunities have expanded, and now the Chinese giant is proud to launch its advertising platform Huawei Ads. 

If you have not had time to learn anything about the service, it is high time to do so now. We will conduct a detailed review of the platform, highlighting its main advantages, tools for work, and the results of the first tests on the launch of an advertising campaign through Huawei Ads. Let's begin!

Benefits of Huawei Ads

Let's start with something more general and talk about the benefits of the platform in terms of traffic arbitration:

1. Vast audience of users. You can advertise your offer to more than 700 million active users; this number tends to grow every month.

2. Lots of targeting options on the interests and attributes of users. It is possible to segment the target audience by a standard list of options. For instance, you can divide people by demographics, region, marital status, workplace, position, and even by the audience engagement index.

3. Wide range of traffic sources. Earlier, we have not in vain talked about how well Huawei has managed to develop its ecosystem because all the developments created can now be freely used in advertising as traffic sources. AppGallery, Huawei Music, Huawei Assistant, Huawei Browser, Huawei Video, Huawei Books, Petal Search, Huawei Themes, and even partner services. By the way, the latter even includes TikTok. Therefore, the possibilities regarding the launch of an advertising campaign are colossal.

4. Free registration. You sign up for an account, create an advertising campaign, set it up, and get profit, isn't that convenient? 

5. A variety of ad formats. There are about 10-15 ad formats, which is already a lot because now it is possible to combine native ads, screen savers, motivational banners with bonuses and promotions, and many other options in one advertising campaign.

6. Three payment models. We will discuss this in more detail in a separate block of today's review. In addition to the three standard payment variations, the company offers a webmaster something more intriguing.

7. Many tools for retargeting. Even if some of your target audience still won't take advantage of an offer after the traffic is driving in, there's no need to worry. Just refer to the retargeting capabilities, and you'll reach your already high ROI.

8. The built-in landing page builder – Venus. Now the algorithm includes landing pages for the categories of online shopping, leisure, games, and household services. Gradually the developers promise to introduce more templates into the system, but it is clear that this does not apply to some verticals like adult, nutra, or gambling.

9. Automatic budget optimization. Artificial intelligence will help you maximize your profits with minimal investment while promoting your campaign. It can raise or lower the cost of a targeted action depending on the response from the audience. 

10. Connect a third-party tracker to your ad campaign.

We'll highlight a completely new feature in traffic arbitrage, which was not available in any advertising network - direct installation of the app while watching the ad. The user needs to click on the active button, and the application will start installing itself. You don't have to go to the store – everything is done automatically.

What advertising formats are available in Huawei Ads?

We have finally understood the advantages of the platform. We can move on to the specific areas of its work processes. We will start with the advertising formats of the network. There are three in total, but each is divided into several other subgroups.

Media advertising

Standard creatives in video or simple image format are available here. There are a few more types of advertising:

Screensaver. The usual full-screen banner that runs when you open an application;

Cross-page ads. The same full-screen variation of the usual banner, but its display occurs when switching between screens in applications;

Roller. A video-creative is played before, during, or after the video viewing. Such material can last 15 or 30 seconds;

Reward. The most relevant variant for the game subjects is where the user is offered to watch the video in exchange for an in-game bonus.

Banner. It is a standard advertising format placed in a certain part of the application's screen.

Native advertising. It is used almost entirely at the webmaster's discretion, and in addition to images or videos, you can embed full-fledged text here.

Search advertising.

This option works with Huawei - Pental Search, which guarantees a highly accurate match between the search requests of potential customers and the keyword database from the webmaster. It offers several promotion formats and the creation of recommendations according to the targeting settings.

The ads can be of two varieties:

1. Text and image. A full-fledged banner ad can adapt to the user's device and be displayed in small, large, or triple sizes. 

2. Product advertising. It demonstrates product cards to a potential client. It is equally effective because it allows showing the goods from all possible sides, to demonstrate the advantages of the offer and customer feedback about the advertising offer.

Advertising of application download.

This format is relevant to applications that the webmaster uploads to AppGallery and plans to promote them using the Huawei advertising network. The following promotion options are available to choose from: 

In application search. Even if this is a standard search, you can add as many as 200 keywords for just one application. Therefore the probability that your ad will be seen by the entire target audience is extremely high.

Referrals. The same standard way of advertising, only in the block of recommended applications. 

Placement at the top. When users enter AppGallery for the first time, they do not yet have an established list of recommendations. And therefore, the store offers to install the top six optional applications. It is in this list that your development may end up.

Payment models in Huawei Ads

As we said earlier, the advertising network has three main payment models - CPC, CPM, and CPI. However, there are a couple of interesting features in this section as well, which we will tell you about next.

First, pay per click is only available for contextual advertising in Petal Search. Second, in addition to the standard form of cooperation, the campaign is ready to conduct a partnership with an arbitrator in the format of direct contracts. At the moment, this option is only available for branded ads by keyword request, but its expansion is possible in the near future.

And there is one more important thing. At the moment, the advertising platform supports only dollars, euros, yen, or pounds.

How did the first launches of Huawei Ads perform? 

Initially, the advertising network was only available to a few of the largest advertisers. As for partner networks, the first to work with the platform were MGCom and CityAds Media. Both gave positive feedback on working with the service. 

One of the main advantages was the ability to install applications while viewing ads without going to a store page. All it takes is one click and the user becomes a client. Such a step not only makes the cooperation between the user and the advertiser more convenient but also generally has a good effect on the statistics, increasing the conversion rate by 35-50%.

As an illustrative example, the guys tried to run a promotion for the game Global City, wherein 30 days of advertising campaign received 2800 downloads from Germany and 1700 downloads from Poland. The final ROAS was 70% higher than they had planned and CR was 4 times higher than on other in-app platforms.

Bottom line

Huawei Ads is a truly innovative platform for traffic arbitrage, which offers much more features than standard ad networks can. Several payment formats at a time, numerous ad templates, its own landing builder tool, the ability to attach third-party trackers, automatic tracking of the advertising campaign, and its optimization by artificial intelligence. This and much more are now available to webmasters completely free of charge.