"Traffic Is Disgusting" — 3 Case Studies About the New Huawei Ads Platform from Affiliates

In February 2022, Huawei Mobile Services announced the expansion of its Huawei Ads platform from Asia to overseas markets, including the Middle East, Africa, and Pakistan regions. A number of affiliates jumped onto the new traffic source with the hope to find and explore a new gold mine before their competitors. However, for most affiliates, the results so far have not been as glittering as they expected.

At Partnerkin, we have made several reviews about the Huawei Ad platform and even wrote a full guide on how affiliates can get started with it and set up their first campaign (You can read it here). In spite of that, we had not yet brought to you real case studies from the campaign performance results of the affiliates who went ahead to run campaigns on Huawei Ads in different niches like dating, sweeps, gambling, app installs, and so forth.

In this article, we are sharing with you case studies from 3 different affiliates who went ahead to test the Huawei Ads platform. These affiliates shared with us their experience of using the new traffic source, their campaign results, and their final verdicts on the traffic source. So read to the end to learn more from their experiences:

Huawei Ads is an advertising platform from Huawei Mobile Services. It was introduced in 2020, but for the Asia-Pacific region. And in February 2022, the platform became available to all users.

Advertisers can now reach owners of Huawei devices, third-party apps, and Huawei apps: Huawei AppGallery, Huawei Browser, Huawei Assistant, Huawei Music, Huawei Video, Huawei Themes, and Petal Search.

​With over 730 million potential customers worldwide, Huawei's mobile ecosystem is the third largest. Advertisers gain access to the market share that has never before been used for advertising purposes and gain the ability to sell their products and services.

Cases of Working with Huawei Ads 

The team at Partnerkin interviewed three affiliate marketers who worked with Huawei Ads and were ready to share their experiences and opinions on Huawei Ads.

Case Study 1

"The account could only be topped off offline via SWIFT, and there was a $15 transfer commission charged".

User BigMax, the owner of a small Telegram chat group named Huawei Ads, tried to work with the Huawei advertising platform. He left a case study in his Telegram group in which he also mentioned a number of problems he faced, so we had to contact him and this is what he had to share out of his experience.

Tell us why you decided to work with Huawei Ads?

I decided to start working with Huawei Ads immediately after the presentation. It was a new site, that promised a large scale since it has a huge amount of fresh traffic.

In your post in the group, you wrote that there were problems with paying for advertising, and besides that, were there other problems? Maybe at the stage of creating a campaign or connecting applications?

No, there were no more problems, after the creation of the campaign, it immediately went for verification.

Are there any problems that advertisers who want to test the site should be aware of?

I think that there are some issues, but I didn’t get to them because of a failure with funding the account. But in the chat, most affiliates write that they are getting tons of traffic and quite successfully. The silence around Huawei Ads only means that those who advertise there would not want the competition.

The Complaints by BigMax

After seeing the news about the presentation of Huawei Ads in Russia, I decided to test a new source of gambling traffic in Russia. I found an offer, connected the PWA add-on, then set up the campaign and sent it for moderation. However, the question arose with the funding of the advertising account.

It was only possible for me to fund the account offline, through a SWIFT transfer, which I tried to do through Tinkoff Bank, this operation also included a commission of $15.

The funds were supposed to be credited within three days, after this period I wrote to support - I explained everything and attached a screenshot and I got this response:

"In most cases, Huawei Ads will receive your payment within 1-3 business days and review your top-up request within 3 business days of receiving payment. The result of the verification will be sent to you by e-mail, internal message, or SMS. If the application is rejected, then refer to the feedback and make the necessary changes, and then resubmit it for consideration."

Three more days passed, but there was still no money in the account. I continued to inquire, and I received this answer:

"Dear advertiser, we have reported this to the appropriate department. Thank you for your patience. Should we require further information or your assistance, we will contact you as soon as possible."

A couple of days later, I wrote once again to the support team, and they answered that they simply could not find my payment.

My patience had run out, and I decided to get my money back by ditching this complicated funding process. I sent my details, to which they answered that the details are incorrect and that Huawei Ads only works with legal entities. Further correspondence with support did not lead to any results, the account was not funded, the money was not returned, and my experience ended there.

Many other guys from the Huawei Ads telegram chat group faced the challenge of funding their accounts. But there are also those who wrote that they figured out the way to fund their accounts and started spending on ads from the first days of the launch of Huawei Ads in Russia.

Case Study 2

"Traffic is disgusting — one registration for 500-1 000 installs, while the payment was for the install".

User Buster shared his experience with the site. Unluckily, he was unable to complete the campaigns.

Hello, what difficulties do you have with Huawei Ads?

It is impossible to top up the account balance online, and now funding from Russia is not available at all. You need to transfer money via SWIFT at a bank branch, while the transfer must be from the company that is registered in Huawei Ads.

Is it possible to promote gray verticals?

Any campaign may be manipulated if the review wasn't well moderated. Though I'm not sure if it's still that simple. However, the traffic quality was disgusting — I got one registration for 500-1 000 installations, with the condition that the payment was per install.

Yes, the cost of the installation is cheaper, but not much cheaper than on Google. At first, we were even glad that we found a good platform, but then we quickly got upset, because the traffic quality is worse than that of pop-under ads. In general, no matter how hard we tried, we didn’t manage to get a positive ROI, not even close to breaking even.

What verticals did you promote?

Gambling, Betting, Payday Loans, Dating.

What about the bidding?

It is better than on other sites, but what's the point if the traffic is of disgusting quality?

Can you share the statistics of one of the recent campaigns?

The last time we spent $500 on gambling, we got something like 2 000 installs and 2 registrations.

Case Study 3

Rustam Gasanbekov works with Huawei Ads as a direct advertiser. He had a positive opinion about the platform and they are happy to share it with us.

Tell us, what difficulties did you have in getting access to Huawei Ads? How were you able to solve them?

The Chinese bureaucracy is the major issue when executing an agreement with Huawei Ads. For the previous six months, we were collecting data on our turnovers in order to qualify as partners. However, our tenacity paid off, and we succeeded in getting the agreement signed.

Is it possible to promote gray verticals on the court? Have you tried to do it yourself?

Yes, spending on gray offers works. For example, for Huawei Ads, we are exclusive partners in the gambling vertical, that is, only we and our partners, whom we have connected to the site, can upload gambling advertisements. We also tested other gray verticals as well.

What niches are you promoting now?

I work with whitehat verticals like gaming, carsharing, loans, and ecom. We also have a gambling department and partners who advertise through us in other areas.

Is the bidding process fully manual, or do you have any issues?

In fact, Huawei Ads is an in-app platform that operates on the principle of a second-price direct auction. In terms of promotion, it is good. The only drawback is that, unlike other in-app traffic sources, Huawei Ads does not offer direct access to dealing with inventory.

What can you say about the ad creatives? How often do you have to change the images, videos, or ad copy?

We are a direct partner and work with Huawei on the provided deposit. Every quarter we pay postpaid expenses, so there are no problems in the form of changing images, ad copy, and even accounts. Creatives live quite a long time. For some placements, we update them every 1-2 months.

Can you share the statistics of one of the recent days?

From what vertical are these statistics?

Hypercasual games.

Bottom Line

As you can see from the reviews of webmasters, everyone has a different experience with Huawei Ads. Rustam is delighted with the platform and talks about good results, BigMax had problems at the moment with payment and support did not solve it, and Buster responds extremely negatively and does not advise others to even try.

If you have worked with Huawei Ads, you can go ahead and share your opinion in the comments — we would be interested to know the experience of other affiliates.