This article comes from the WeChat public account:Gao Rong Capital (ID: banyancapital), Presenter: Zhang Guoping (traffic expert, CEO of Guangnian Lab, traffic consultant for more than 40 large Internet companies such as Ctrip and Alibaba Cloud, and former head of Alibaba’s online marketing department,Responsible for the traffic acquisition of Alibaba International Station in 191 countries), the picture is from: Visual China
Throughout the current China Mobile Internet traffic market, it has entered an era of relative stocks, and traffic has become more valuable than gold. Today’s traffic growth has become like growing trees in the desert. Expensive traffic and difficult transformation are difficult problems for all entrepreneurs.
This requires abandoning the original extensive traffic acquisition method and using new thinking, new technologies and matching organizational structures to drive the effective growth of traffic.
This sharing guest Zhang Guoping pointed out in the sharing that there are only two traffic patterns in the world, one is based on keywords, and the other is based on the relationship chain. There is an underlying formula for acquiring traffic—content flows in the middle of the channel. Today’s “traffic hunters” must walk on two legs with data and technology to find the “oasis” of traffic.
The following is a compilation of Zhang Guoping’s sharing notes:
I am honored to share with you the new thinking, new technology and new team about traffic. My understanding of traffic stems from triple crossovers. In 2002, when I was a university, I was a webmaster. One person made a website with 150,000 traffic per day. In 2006, I went to Alibaba for online marketing. I was responsible for overseas free traffic channels in large companies. This is the first. A cross-border; the second cross-border, I am from a technical background, but in the marketing department, I have the dual thinking of technology and market; the third cross-border, I am in China, but responsible for overseas traffic, you can compare domestic Play traffic with foreign countries. It is these crossovers that give me more perspective to observe and study traffic.
First, the current status of the traffic: large-scale traffic, team division and methodology
Let’s first look at the current status of traffic. Many people don’t have enough awareness of the crisis.
1. Traffic market: the traffic pool is basically saturated, and the user scale growth rate drops below 1% year-on-year
From the perspective of the traffic market, the overall plate has basically not risen. According to data from QuestMobile in November 2019, “China Mobile’s Internet traffic pool is basically saturated, and the user scale growth rate fell below 1% for the first time.” In the traffic industry, we often say, “Traffic is more precious than gold”. Gold continues to be mined every year, but the flow has hardly been increased, so many people say “Hoarding is not as good as hoarding flow”.
Currently, the cost of traffic increases by at least 40% every year, but the profit margin of many industries is 20%, which is equivalent to the profitable business this year. As soon as the cost of traffic rises next year, it will no longer make money. At least it is impossible to buy traffic.
2. Team division: 99% of traffic teams are divided by channels, destined for mediocrity
Today, 99% of the traffic teams in the industry are divided by channel. Some people are responsible for Baidu delivery, some are responsible for vibrato delivery, etc. The benefit of this division of labor is that KPIs are well calculated, but it brings a lot of problems. Everyone far overestimates the professionalism of channel delivery. Many people think that there should be a professional presence in buying traffic on Baidu and buying traffic on Douyin. In fact, the similarity is 90%. Differentiated places An employee with good basic quality can definitely learn in a month, including how to use the background and how to communicate with the official.
The disadvantage of dividing channels according to channels lies in the fact that the three links for traffic delivery have completely different requirements for capabilities. The first step is to do data mining, which is the work of science students. Differences in data mining are huge. Professional data companies can mine millions of keywords at a time, but there are companies in the industry that can find tens of thousands of keywords. It is very good, and there are many traditions. There are hundreds of keywords lying on the backstage of companies in the industry.
The second step is advertising creativity, to attract readers’ attention, click, and then generate action, This is the life of liberal arts students.
The third step is the landing page, which requires more product managers and people who understand the UI. At present, most companies in the industry will put all advertisements on the same landing page.
Therefore, it is necessary to ask a delivery person to do both data mining, creativity, and landing page. How split is this person’s ability. There is a huge gap between the three ability items, and any one will have to make great efforts to do well. We recently planned to write an article titled “How to Build a Mediocre Traffic Team.” By dividing channels by channels, we can definitely build a mediocre team.
3. Traffic methodology: lack of technology and data-driven thinking
At present, there are many traffic training courses on the market, you will find the same, but not many people think that to do traffic is to really understand the technology and data. The Alibaba Traffic Team was established in 2002. The earliest was to use technology and data to drive traffic growth, so we formed a set of our own methodology.
Second and positive cases: Why do you need a new growth method and team structure?
After understanding the basic traffic status, we will use a positive case and a negative case to specifically substitute, why today we need a new growth method and team structure.
1. Positive case: know how to play traffic
This positive case can be used immediately after everyone learns it. Once we did an app’s traffic growth, relying on Zhihu to answer a question, it increased the installed capacity by more than 4,000 a day. How to do it?
Everyone knows that every industry knows a lot about related issues and content. We first use data mining to find millions of keywords that netizens in this industry care about, and then find many question posts corresponding to keywords in Zhihu. Afterwards, the page views of each post will be monitored at different points in time, so you can know how the post traffic is increasing.
Know that more than 80% of posts have no traffic; some hot posts have hundreds of thousands of traffic per hour, but there are enough answers, and our answers may not get much traffic; but some posts, There is about 3,000 traffic per hour, but the number of answers is only single digits, so answering under such a post is basically equal to free “picking traffic”. The reason for this phenomenon is also very simple. When this question was created, it didn’t get many recommendations in Zhihu, but it ranked very high in Baidu, so it can attract a lot of traffic.
Behind this case is the use of data to drive traffic growth. We have seen a real case: an 8-person team doing Zhihu marketing, each person on the team has to answer more than 40 questions per day on average, but for more than half a year, only 200 traffic can be obtained from Zhihu every day, because Many problems have no traffic below.
If you want to get traffic in one place, you need to know whether there is traffic here. This is the most common sense. Unfortunately, many people do not have this basic data operation thinking. Today I asked where is the flow of Douyin? Where is the flow of WeChat? Many people cannot answer, which is why the traffic is not doing well.
2. Negative case: How do you advertise?
Very common negative cases are common in today’s advertising. First of all, search engine delivery. Here is a real case of the education industry. First, I selected a number of keywords; for the keyword of “Elementary English 3rd Grade 2”, the highlight of the advertising text is “double teacher class and Harvard Peking University teacher”. “Excellent course”; but the landing page is again saying “Language and English training camp”. Many people ask why the effectiveness of advertising is poor? Through this case, we can see that demand and supply are completely separated.
Today, many people do simple information flow. There is a background for information flow, which generally locks people according to labels such as region, gender, and age. Now it’s basically a general investment. I don’t know who is interested. I think that “the first exposure, there will always be people interested.” The advertising platform is charged according to CPM, the more impressions, the more the cost of delivery. In fact, both To B and To C companies can be accurately delivered, but currently 99% of the companies on the market cannot.
Three, how to understand traffic: starting with several classification methods
Next we look at the classification method of traffic, because how to classify is actually about team building.
1. According to whether it is directly paid: free traffic, paid traffic
The so-called direct payment is because there is no real free traffic in the industry. When you build a flow team of 2 to 3 people, their salary is also a cost. There is a system in Alibaba that converts any kind of traffic acquisition behavior and any input resources into money, and then calculates the input-output ratio. The permanent model is ROI. Everyone knows that Ali’s engineers are expensive. In the past, the cost of making an SEO change for Ali was probably over 1 million, so if the traffic obtained after the change cannot generate more than 1 million in revenue, it will fail.
2. According to the ownership of traffic: self-built team to obtain traffic and integrate others’ traffic
Many people get their own traffic from a self-built team, but integrating other people’s traffic is also a way. There is a children’s programming company in the education industry. For a long time, there is no self-built traffic team, and more is to integrate the traffic of others. For example, some people have hundreds of thousands of WeChat groups. If they can help this company distribute 49 courses, 40 will be given to the traffic master, and only 9 will be left. It seems very sincere. But everyone knows that education is a high-LTV industry. The 49-block course is equivalent to a cosmetic trial, and there are 9999-block courses behind. Once you get a user’s mobile phone number through the 49-block drainage, and guide to register the app, There is a great opportunity to sell high-priced unit-paid courses. And such customer acquisition costs are acceptable in the industry.
3. According to the scope: public domain traffic, private domain trafficAmount
The division of public domain and private domain traffic also reflects the anxiety of everyone’s traffic. People who play private domain traffic must also understand some ways of playing public domain traffic.
The essence of the two lies in: the model of public domain traffic is a funnel model, 1000 people come in, and the last 50 people pay; but the private domain traffic is an enlarged model, 50 people enter the private domain pool, and finally can be affected by various fission methods To 1,000 people. Private domain traffic is well done, which is equivalent to having a traffic amplifier.
4. According to the content format: graphic traffic, audio and video traffic
The two different forms of content represent the past and the present. But my judgment is that neither can replace anyone. Although the audio and video traffic is hot now, the graphic traffic will continue to exist.
5. According to the key links: pull new, activate, retain, realize, recommend
The fifth classification method comes from overseas growth hacking theory. The AARRR model (Pirate Model) is to divide the key links of traffic into 5 categories— —Pull new (Acquisition), activate (Activation), Retain (Retention), realize (Revenue), recommend< span class="text-remarks" label="Remarks">(Referral). But the correct sequence should be activation and retention first, then recommendation, and finally monetization and renewal.
It can be imagined that a bucket is receiving water. If the bucket has no bottom, that is, it is left as 0, then it does not make sense to receive water, which is the old saying that “the bamboo basket fetches water is empty.”
6. According to the division of labor: content creation, channel distribution
Everyone will observe their own traffic growth team, which can be roughly divided into two groups of people, one group is for content creation, and the other group is for channel distribution, then it depends on how to define content and channels. Explain in detail.
Four, how to do traffic: two modes, one formula
About how to do traffic, I share a framework with you. Through this framework, you will find that many things that were not important before become important, and some things that were previously important are not so important.
1. There are only two traffic modes: keywords, relationship chains
There are only two traffic patterns in the world, one is based on keywords, and the other is based on relationship chains. Because humans disseminate information only these two carriers.
Behind the flow is the demand for information, and the definition of information should be broad. For example, a short video is funny and information, and knowing how to repair a computer is also information.
So how does the information spread? Returning to the primitive society, a person went out to hunt and found a beast and a person could not be caught, so he had to go back to the village and call a bunch of people. How does he spread this information to everyone? One is through language and vocabulary, that is, keywords; the other is through the tribal relationship chain structure, one pass ten, ten pass hundred.
Back to more than 20 years ago, the Internet was not yet popular. A shipyard teacher heard about a technique called underwater welding. He has two ways to learn technical details. The first method is to use the keyword model. At that time, you need to go to the library to check the materials. The library at that time played the role of today’s search engine; the other method is to ask other masters and masters to ask other friends, that is Get information through the relationship chain.
In today’s mobile Internet era, the bottom layer behind information dissemination is still based on keywords or relationship chains. This has been true since ancient times, but the carriers and tools are changing.
Starting from these two traffic modes, if we look at the flow acquisition again, we will have new ideas. Let’s look at the keyword mode first. The fundamental reason why many people fail to vote for Baidu is that they have not found the correct word.
With “Ejiao”A step of.
First, look at traffic from a global and global perspective. For each country to do traffic, the top 1,000 websites and apps in that country should be listed in a table.
Second, it is necessary to observe which traffic is spread by keywords and which traffic is spread according to the relationship chain. Taking WeChat as an example, there are two models. WeChat App has more than a dozen channels for traffic, and we must analyze the rules of the channel.
Third, use data to gain insight into where the traffic is, such as on which keywords and in which KOL hands? If you don’t understand it, it’s equivalent to going to a strange place to swim. You don’t know whether the water is deep or shallow, and the data can help us see a lot of things.
After completing these three steps, in fact, you can find traffic depressions in any channel, but these three points are very hardcore skills.
In addition, in terms of channels, there is another idea worth noting, that is, It is not necessary to bring all customers to their own apps. In fact, they can stay in the channel ecosystem to achieve customer conversion and delivery. For example, when doing traffic in Baidu and Douyin, you can directly undertake it through the applet of the platform.
Because any platform has a hidden rule, once you want to take users away from the platform, the platform will charge more money when the advertising system is designed. And the user is very happy to swipe the information flow, and the willingness to ask him to download an app is not so high. There are also two ways to advertise on Facebook overseas, one is to post your own App or H5 web page, and the other is to post your own Facebook Page’s attention. But the premise is that the team must have sufficient confidence in their ability to operate in the private domain.
2. How to use enterprise WeChat to play private domain traffic
We started to study how to do private domain traffic through corporate WeChat since last year. We judge that corporate WeChat must be the future. This is because once the personal WeChat account is blocked, the data assets will be instantly reset to zero, which is what everyone calls the “one night crematorium”. At least at the official level, enterprise WeChat allows private domain positioning, and the function has already met most of the needs. At present, the function of the circle of friends is still unclear.
We have already run the link on private domain traffic and fission based on WeChat official tools. And a company WeChat employee number can add 250,000 friends, This is a very large amount. Although there are restrictions on active additions, there are no restrictions on passive additions.
One thing to note is that many people use enterprise WeChat to play private domains will have a path dependence, that is, to translate the original personal WeChat gameplay, which is not acceptable. It is necessary to re-examine the ecology of enterprise WeChat and explore new methods in combination with your own business.
3. SEO traffic acquisition
Search engines are still a very important source of traffic today. You can still find a more efficient and low-cost way to obtain traffic through the aforementioned traffic acquisition formula.
Take a financial company that provides loan services as an example. During peak hours, you can get 2 million traffic from Baidu at zero cost every day. At that time, the method was to find millions of keywords related to the industry through data mining, and found that “calculator” actually ranked second. A lot of people were searching for a house buying calculator, loan calculator, car buying calculator. and many more. The next step is to think about how to meet these search needs of users. Our definition of content should be broad, an article, a founder’s story is content, a tool is also content, and the tool has a longer LTV. So this company did not directly write an article about the calculator to buy a house, but developed more than 40 calculator tools, each tool can get more than 10,000 traffic per day on average. And the calculation results will not be displayed directly. You need to leave the mobile phone number and send the calculation results to the mobile phone, which is equivalent to tens of thousands of Leaders every day at the sales end.
Another example is the rental industry. The rental information is the content itself. Many users are searching for this content. If you can H5 the content in the App and make many adaptations to the search engine, such investment will actually be very high. Output ratio.
4. Use content as a hook to do App growth
Introduce a method of using content as a hook to do App growth. This method is widely used abroad, that is, using attractive content as a hook, and then combining Deeplink deep link technology to achieve growth in installed capacity. For example, Uber used “one-click to go to West Lake to play a cruise ship” as a content hook in Hangzhou. When users see an H5 page, they will be guided to download the app after entering. After the download is complete, they will jump to the cruise ship interface. Meituan also used this method in the early days. The user scanned the QR code on the table when eating in a restaurant, and the app download link popped up. After downloading, it would enter the store.target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow” style=”text-decoration: none;”>Gao Rong Capital (ID: banyancapital), Presenter: Zhang Guoping