Is Guangdiantong Worth Using as a Customer Acquisition Channel in 2024?

Here’s a quick summary of my recent testing results:

Whether it’s adding WeChat or Enterprise WeChat, authorizing mini-program registration, buying with 1 cent, or giving things away for free, the data shows it’s not worth your time to run Tencent Guangdiantong ads.

You can get millions or even tens of millions of frontend impressions and clicks, but the actual bounce rate hits around 90%—no matter how you optimize the landing page, it stays that way. Yet average time on page can be pushed to 40 seconds or even 1 minute, and the proportion of users who actually interact (click, scroll, etc.) after entering is only about 2%. That’s an effectively infinite cost per engaged user. Compare that to typical user sessions, where conversions happen within ~13 seconds. Interestingly, both the normal-user behavior data and Guangdiantong’s follow-up conversion metrics come from Tencent’s own analytics tools.

Quick math: with 1 million impressions and a 2% click rate, that’s 20,000 users entering the landing page. Of those, only about 400 actually interact (click, scroll, browse). How many of those 400 finish a conversion (register, place an order)? Even if your cost per click is just ¥0.10, that’s ¥2,000 spent for 400 engaged users. With a standard commercial conversion rate of ~1%, that’s ¥500 per acquired customer. Even if your conversion rate is unusually strong at 5%, you get only 20 customers—¥100 each. Isn’t that already close to your real customer-acquisition cost?

Is every ad campaign like this?

From this angle, any product claiming to acquire users through Tencent Guangdiantong should be viewed with healthy skepticism—unless they can prove their acquisition cost is below ¥120 per *engaged* (non-paying) user. This helps explain ByteDance’s rapid ad-revenue growth over the years.

If we treat ¥120 as the cost per effective user, then reaching your hiring targets roughly breaks even. The world is pretty unglamorous—it’s all just math.

For ordinary people, great content is still the best customer-acquisition channel.