Datastory and MAKA released the 2016 WeChat H5 Data Report.
Some highlight includes:
- Average conversion rate of H5 campaign is 4.1%
- Average pageview of H5 campaign increased 27% year over year
- 60% of pageview comes from WeChat Moment
- Storytelling is the most popular type of H5
Data was collected from 100,000 H5 campaigns made using MAKA.
Disclaimer:
- MAKA’s H5 templates are simpler slide shows (swipe to view name page type) compared with customized developed H5 campaigns.
- The data is sampled from the relatively more successful campaigns only
Definition: H5 means websites written in HTML5 langurage. Usually it means mobile websites.
Average page view increased 26.6% year over year
However, the growth is slower than the 30% Monthly Active User increase of WeChat. H5 campaign are not as popular as they were last year. They no longer represent an innovative campaign format, and users cares more about the content than the format itself.
Most of the traffic comes from tier 1 cities
This is consistent with the targeting audience that companies are targeting via H5.
60% of users access H5 page via WeChat Moment
Compared with last year, pageview from WeChat Moment decreased by 6 points; while pageview from WeChat Official Account increased by 13 points.
Two reasons could cause this shift:
- Users are less likely to share H5 on WeChat Moment
- Tencent is much stricter about incentivized sharing campaigns in 2016
Tencent forbids companies to give money or gifts in exchange for users to share campaigns. You can not even use the word 分享 (share) as the action call at the end of the campaign.
Most popular H5 campaigns are between 6-10 pages
H5 content
Storytelling is the most widespread H5 category.
It used to be games, competitions and personality quiz that spread across users WeChat Moment. Tencent forbids all these types of easily sharable H5 formats. What’s left is strong story telling campaigns.
That’s also the reason that popular H5 campaigns of 2016 are mostly in the storytelling category.
45.5% of H5 campaign have an action call that links to third party website
The number of campaign with action call button triples compared with year 2015’s 15.0%. Among the action call links, 16% go to a signup form.
Industry distribution of H5 campaign
Conclusion
We see a decrease in penetration of H5 campaigns. The key to a successful campaign is having a good story to tell, while technical execution is not a point of differentiation anymore.
Working with KOLs to spread the H5 campaign is not a bad idea, but be realistic about the low conversation rate of H5 campaigns. Directly connecting to the signup form/shop/follow-us-link might be more straightforward and efficient.