From blind seeding to "precision seeding", Alimama leverages AI to unlock greater growth space.

In the Spring of Stabilizing Traffic

As 2026 kicks off, we are welcoming a vibrant spring full of AI and technological vitality.

From the unconventional red envelope campaigns to successive Spring Festival galas rolled out across platforms, the AI competition among major players has almost become the "second core theme" during the holiday period. Correspondingly, search, dialogue, content generation, health services, intelligent assistants... AI is penetrating into daily life at an unprecedented speed, quietly reshaping consumers' decision-making patterns.

While the consumer side has accelerated its transformation noticeably, is the operation side evolving in sync?

For brands, the essence of the business world in the past was a race for traffic. Major promotion nodes meant concentrated resources, increased budgets, and rapidly rising public awareness and sales in a short period. Scale was the most intuitive indicator, and seizing positions was the most common strategy.

However, under the current general environment, the market atmosphere has long changed quietly: brands' excitement about "scale" is declining, while their anxiety about "efficiency" and "certainty" is on the rise.

This keeps pace with the changes on the demand side. Consumers get inspired by content on content platforms, confirm their choices in search scenarios, and complete the final purchase in live-streaming rooms. Their paths are increasingly networked, while their budgets are becoming more and more prudent. Brands have begun to realize that simply expanding coverage can hardly bring stable returns.

Against this backdrop, the significance of the March 8 Shopping Festival as a consumption node has been re-elevated.

It is the first large-scale promotion after the Spring Festival and the starting point of the annual business rhythm. Alimama previously released a set of data showing that users accumulated during the March 8 campaign have an extremely high conversion rate in the subsequent 618 Mid-Year Shopping Festival, and a considerable number of transaction users in the 618 event come from visitors of the March 8 Festival.

One precise user accumulation at the node will affect the transaction structure of multiple subsequent cycles. For brands, their actions at the current node may become the starting point of the full-year performance curve. For the capital market, the first large-scale promotion at the beginning of the year often serves as a window to observe consumer confidence and platform capabilities.

The new stage requires new solutions to break through bottlenecks. On March 2, a roundtable discussion centered on the March 8 Festival was held in Hangzhou. Alimama released the new strategy for this year's March 8 event, "AI Empowers New Beginnings, Precision Nurturing Drives Growth", and interpreted new capabilities, new policies and new directions on site.

At the moment when the official launch of the March 8 event is just around the corner, the discussion obviously goes far beyond a simple node deployment. Under the background that traffic no longer overflows at a high speed, how can brands move in the right direction from the very first step of the year? How can the platform use AI to turn spring new launches into the cornerstone of full-year business operations?

In this spring of accelerating AI evolution, Alimama is trying to provide a systematic answer to reshape business growth.

AI Empowers New Beginnings, Precision Nurturing Drives Growth

Many brands still use category-based thinking for advertising. They strive for a higher share in a sufficiently large market, concentrate budgets on high-frequency keywords and general traffic pools, and try to win market share through scale advantage. This logic worked in the stage of rapid traffic expansion, but when the growth rate stabilizes, the marginal return will shrink rapidly. Competition becomes fierce, costs are transparent, and the space for differentiation is constantly squeezed. If they continue to follow the old mindset, growth will only become more resource-consuming and more expensive.

Reality is forcing brands to change their perspectives. In a market with a stable overall volume, growth no longer comes from expanding coverage, but from re-dividing the structure. Based on this, Alimama launched the Brand Power WIN (Brand Measurement Framework), which provides a more suitable and accurate measurement standard for brand operation in a complex environment. W (Widespread) represents full-domain reach, measuring the breadth of exposure; I (Interaction) stands for deepened interaction, representing the "nurturing depth" of consumer mindshare; N (Navigate) refers to brand search competitiveness, the core of the entire model, corresponding to users' active re-search behavior after being reached and engaged.

"The new opportunity for brand growth does not lie in making existing categories more involutionary, but in defining the track in advance," Hu Bao, General Manager of Brand Business at Alimama Marketing and Commercial Operation Center, put forward a judgment during the roundtable. He believes that when traffic no longer overflows, the truly valuable capability is the pre-positioned positioning of trends.

The value of this model has already taken shape in the practice of specific brands.

Take Murad, a functional skincare brand, as an example. On the highly crowded anti-aging track, it faces both long-term mind accumulation of international big brands and competition from cost-effective domestic products. If it continues to compete head-on in the "general anti-aging crowd", it will only fall into high-cost involution. With the help of the AI panoramic insight of Brand Power WIN, the brand captured more specific high-frequency intentions: the demand of outdoor groups for "skincare while playing", and the anxiety of commuters for "light makeup look without collagen loss". Focusing on the segmented trend of "active defense anti-aging", Murad defined its own track, and accurately reached ingredient-focused users, high-conversion groups and active users of competing products through layered W, I, N disassembly. As a result, it achieved a 254% year-on-year sales growth at the launch node of its new retinol product.

When trend judgment, crowd disassembly and search support are integrated into the same logic, growth is no longer just a traffic game, but a result of pre-positioned positioning.

The WIN model provides a set of judgment frameworks, but after the track is locked, what really widens the gap is often execution efficiency. That is precisely the core of Alimama's new March 8 strategy "AI Empowers New Beginnings, Precision Nurturing Drives Growth", which realizes global evolution from track insight, intention identification to content nurturing and conversion support.

The "AI Empowers New Beginnings" focuses on intelligent efficiency improvement of full-link operation capabilities: efficiency is always the core variable of business.

The core value of AI capabilities lies in making judgments more reliable: from product selection and creativity, to advertising optimization, to intention capture and precise matching, AI capabilities are being embedded in more links.

On the creative side, material production has become learnable. The creative agent "Mio" learns the structure of industry hit content, and outputs material suggestions combined with product selling points. This means that creativity no longer relies entirely on inspiration, but can be disassembled, analyzed and optimized.

The upgrade of landing page capabilities shortens the distance between clicks and transactions. Taobao Block 3D Lite can generate 3D effects from white-background product images. Data shows that the single-product transaction CVR has increased by 29%, add-to-cart and favorite conversion rate has increased by 16%, and stay interaction rate has increased by 13%. The gap between creativity and conversion has been narrowed.

Materials are no longer just expressions, but an optimizable node in the operation link. Content is no longer just an exposure action, but an optimizable part of the operation link.

After the material side comes the advertising side. One of the core pain points of merchants is the inaccurate judgment of advertising decisions. The upgrade of the "Platform Recommendation Plus" model of Full-site Promotion actually changes the evaluation logic. The model introduces user preference factors, emotional feedback indicators, price band structure and life cycle dimensions, so that the judgment of product potential no longer only depends on historical performance, but returns to the competitive environment and crowd structure.

At the same time, category-specific advertising capabilities and refined ROI recommendation models are launched, enabling products with different profit structures to have more adapted resource allocation logic. High-margin and high-conversion products no longer compete under the same rules.

"AI is not a black box. It should become an interpretable and reviewable operation assistant," Mo Li, General Manager of Performance Advertising Business at Alimama Commercial Operation Center, said during the roundtable. In an era of more cautious budgets, merchants need to understand the logic behind each input, rather than only seeing fluctuations in results.

To this end, its provided "Xiao Wan Navigator" can generate advertising plans by learning from competing products, and "Xiao Wan Guardian" realizes all-weather automatic optimization and outputs reports. AI begins to participate in the decision-making process, rather than only staying at the execution level.

In the matching link, intention identification capabilities are further optimized. AI Insight has upgraded from word matching to intention identification, incorporating scenarios and emotions behind long-tail expressions into the model's understanding scope, so that scenario demands such as "hair smoothing artifact" and "library gentle style outfit" can be captured by the system. The matching between keywords and crowds is closer to real demands. Different motivations behind the same keyword are disassembled into multiple levels, making crowd targeting more refined.

At the same time, automation capabilities at the execution level are also launched synchronously. Automatic top-up avoids plan suspension caused by budget interruption, and automatic rules complete intelligent scaling and rhythm calibration during monitoring and advertising processes, amplifying transaction amount and alleviating the pressure of manual monitoring.

AI capabilities provide more accurate and efficient underlying support for the new stage of business. With more accurate judgment, more stable materials and more refined matching, operation actions are possible to be more refined.

"The so-called precision nurturing is to complete positioning before the track becomes crowded," Hu Bao disassembled "precision nurturing growth" into four dimensions: track, crowd, content and search. Simply put, the logic of "precision nurturing" is to jump out of the involutionary general categories and define your own home court before trends take shape.

This means that competition is no longer limited to traditional categories, but extends to more specific consumption scenarios. Brands that performed well in the past, such as Haier and OPPO, have joined hands with Alimama to build new track concepts such as "smart AI laundry and care" and "imaging flagship mobile phones", essentially defining their own growth positions in advance.

Specifically, relying on AI insight capabilities, the Brand Power WIN has now disassembled more than 200 segmented category tracks, and supports brands to customize their own tracks. Brands can jump out of the crowded general categories and use the WIN model to find differentiated fast growth tracks in advance during the March 8 promotion.

But defining the track is only the first step. For merchants, the real difficulty often appears in the next link: crowd matching.

Especially at the traffic explosion node of March 8 superimposed with the new product launch window, once the cold start lags, the entire growth cycle may be missed. Competition within the same track is also more intense: users get inspired by content today, and may be intercepted by competing products tomorrow.

To solve this practical problem, the crowd capability of the WIN model has been upgraded. The strategy is summarized in three words: seize, chase, expand.

"Seize" refers to locking competing products in the search field. As long as users show hesitation or interest in competing products in the search link, the system will conduct cross-identification and strongly intercept at key nodes to reduce the probability of traffic being intercepted by others; "Chase" refers to dynamic identification of potential demands. In the new product launch stage, instead of only focusing on users who have already searched, the system predicts users' next demands through cross-category association and motivation judgment, and completes the first wave of crowd aggregation in advance; "Expand" refers to expanding the high-potential crowd pool under the WIN model, locking the hesitant group who "want to buy but have not bought yet", and including users closest to the conversion edge into the asset pool through crowd radar and segmented scenario mining.

When the trend track and refined crowds form a closed loop, "precision nurturing" can be truly sustainable, rather than a one-time outbreak. But after crowd locking, another problem arises: can the link between content inspiration and conversion be truly opened?

Many merchants have similar experiences: exposure and interaction data look good, but search and transaction do not increase synchronously. The problem does not lie in the traffic itself, but in the conversion support.

Focusing on the WIN model, relevant capabilities further strengthen the support and conversion links: "New Product Chief" completes precise positioning in category word tracks and supports hesitant crowds; "WinSearch Pro" integrates accumulated traffic inside and outside Taobao through AI crowd insight; "showmax Full-domain Pursuit" completes interest interception immediately after users return to Taobao; "Competition Breakthrough" carries out simultaneous content nurturing in the content link of competing products. Content nurturing no longer only stays at the front-end public awareness level, but forms a closed loop at the search and transaction end.

In the stage of stabilizing traffic, growth no longer relies on scale accumulation, but on pre-positioned judgment and rhythm control. AI provides underlying capabilities, precision nurturing forms operation actions, and growth becomes the final result.

The Brand Power WIN model and the "AI Empowers New Beginnings, Precision Nurturing Drives Growth" strategy respond to a more long-term question: how to find your own growth path in complex contact points.

How to Converge Networked Consumer Touchpoints into a Linear Consumer Journey

In actual operations, merchants' anxiety is far more specific than the surface data.

Users get inspired by short videos, watch reviews on social media, and finally place orders in the search bar or live-streaming rooms. Touchpoints are scattered, and paths are jumping. From the perspective of merchants, this is completely a black box. There are views on the content side, data on the interaction side, and orders on the transaction side, but the paths between them are completely broken. Budgets invested seem to take effect separately on different platforms, but it is difficult to connect causes and effects when looking at the overall business performance.

This anxiety has become stronger this year. With more and more touchpoints and increasingly blurred channel boundaries, merchants can only see isolated processes and final results, but it is difficult to track the complete conversion link.

How to reorganize these scattered touchpoints into a trackable and reviewable journey? This is also the core pain point that Alimama's full-domain capabilities aim to solve.

"Full-domain operation is not just about expanding channels, but about completing cross-scenario identification and collaboration capabilities," Xue Yuan, Head of UD Brand at Alimama Omnimedia Operation Center, summarized this change as the expansion of the "new full-domain operation landscape" during the roundtable discussion. Touchpoints can be scattered, but identification must be unified. Only with stable identification can subsequent reach and conversion