WeChat ads can be targeted based on many different factors about the user and their device.

WeChat User Targeting Options

  • location (currently only supports “Place of Residence” or “Travel Visits”. For “Place of Residence: only support mainland China: province, city, district. For “Travel Visits”: in China: province, city, district; outside of China: country only)
  • age
  • gender
  • educational background
  • behavior, interest, intent (more more on this below)
  • marital status
  • age range of children
  • work status and job type (note: not nearly as detailed as LinkedIn)
  • home or vehicle ownership status
  • whether or not they follow you

WeChat Device Targeting Options

  • operating system
  • brand
  • price
  • operator/provider
  • networking mode (Wi-Fi, 5G, 4G)
  • whether the device was activated within the past 90 days or not

WeChat Re-targeting

  • Target users based on whether or not they have interacted with your brand on WeChat.
  • Target users based on a list of phone numbers or WeChat IDs that you submit to WeChat. This can also be used to target a “lookalike” audience, meaning WeChat will show ads to users that are similar to the users based on the list of phone numbers.

Targeting WeChat Users Based on Behavior, Interest and Intent

WeChat has a wealth of data on users because they use it for so many things – payments, chat, following brands, accessing services, travel and more. When advertising on WeChat, you also get the chance to target users based on their real interests and behavior, as well as their predicted intent.

Custom Tags

Most of the targeting for behavior, interest and intent is done through tags. There are many, many tags.

In the image below, a search for “Chinese” (as in “Chinese language class”) turned up a tag for “Chinese” with 89 million people in the group. It also suggests more detailed tags for “Chinese class”, “study Chinese”, “English teacher” and more.

If you manage a campaign on your own, this is the interface you would use.

image 1

Spend Type

Target users based on where they’ve spent money in the past month.

  • Virtual products, such as phone fees, Q coins or IP phones. Virtual products don’t include online purchases that need to be physically shipped to the user.
  • Physical products and services, such as movie tickets, gas cards, plane tickets. These are things that require the user either take a physical item or have an offline service provided to them in real life. While a plane ticket is digital, the plane ride is physical, so fits in this category.

Spend Level

You cannot target users based on custom spend levels, but you can choose between “high spend”, “low spend” or no spend targeting.

  • High spend = the top 20% of users based on how much they spend.
  • Low spend = the bottom 30%.

Apps

Target users based on which apps are on their phone. WeChat does not know all the apps on everybody’s device, but it does know about some apps on some devices.