Whenever our potential clients approach us, they are very eager to advertise on LINE. With LINE being the pretty much the only local Social Media platform that’s useful (excluding blogging platforms such as Ameblo/Ameba etc), creating an account, updating content and running ads on LINE sounds like a good idea.
The issue is, your expectation and the reality of the budget required.
We used to tell all our clients that LINE is only good when the spend is over £20K, just for setting it up. However we do now have wider range of plans which make LINE more accessible for small businesses or western brands who want to start their Social Media activities in Japan.
“LINE AD PLATFORM”
This is basically a platform that can push your content to 1,000 external publishers/media including LINE timeline & LINE News. The minimum spend is set but considering the situation where businesses only had LINE Official account as an option of advertising it is a small spend (we’ll talk about the fee structure in a minute).
LINE Timeline format: This is compatible with website, app and video advertising. The website ad contains a CTA for sending users to an external page, the app ad is for encouraging users to download apps. And finally video ad is for raising awareness of brands.
LINE News format: There are 2 types of ads available for this. Website ad and app ad.
Hike Network format: This is an external media network which has over 1,000 popular publishers including websites & apps. This one is great as we can be careful about how quickly we go through the budget while paying attention to your ROI.
LINE Timeline & News formats allow us to set audience data using LINE user demographics including age (5 year ranges), gender, geography (by prefecture), 20 different interest categories. The data is based on users activities such as stamp purchase and official accounts followed. LINE Ad Platform allows retargeting & reverse retargeting which are extremely useful especially when we want to be careful with our budget. Other than that it offers range of automated functions to make sure we spread the budget over time, setting appropriate bid on ads etc.
Now, pricing.
Long story short, minimum spend is 1,000,000 Yen (appx £7,866 as of October 2016) if you want access to LINE Timeline and News. If you’re happy with just Hike Network, the minimum is 300,000 Yen (appx £2,359 as of October 2016). Charges are based on CPC (still images), CPM (video content) and impressions (video ads).
LINE has always amazed us with their penetration performance in the country. Based on their stats, almost half of the population (it’s an ageing population too!) is on the platform and 70% of them use it every day. This means nearly 40% of Japan’s population is using LINE every day. With these new options available through the LINE Ad Platform, many businesses must be jumping onto the platform.
So when are you starting yours???
JAPAN BUZZ TEAM