“FaceApp” explosive operational growth strategy!

In recent days, I believe everyone has been flooded with messages about an “aging” app called FaceApp. This article will analyze the “explosive growth of FaceApp” and see what inspiration its strategy can bring us?

If you haven’t heard of FaceApp recently, you’ve been off the internet for too long. This simple filter tool is taking the world's social circles by storm at an astonishing rate.

Using AI technology, FaceApp can transform portrait photos into different shapes, such as changing a crying face into a smiling face, adding bangs to your hairstyle, swapping genders, and 28 other functions. Because the technology is quite powerful, the conversion effect is very natural and the user experience is first-class. Its monetization method is also very simple. The free version relies on advertising revenue (generated photos with logo watermarks), and the premium version charges 138 yuan/year or 258 yuan/permanently (no ads, no watermarks).

Currently, the most popular filter in FaceApp is "aging", which allows you to see what you will look like in 50 years in advance - the pictures that flood your Moments are basically from this special effect.

For the specific effect, please see the "Iron Man" below:

How popular is FaceApp? Data from App Annie shows that in just one week from July 14th to 20th, the total downloads on Android + iOS platforms exceeded 10 million, with estimated revenue approaching 3 million US dollars!

What’s even more surprising is that FaceApp has topped the free list in iOS app stores in 154 countries! In China, only the national-level application Pinduoduo can compete with it, which is two steps ahead of TikTok. Media reports said that the developer of this app is not a big company, but a small team from Russia.

So, how did FaceApp achieve such explosive growth? What inspiration can its strategy bring to us? Next, we will reverse-engineer its user growth strategy based on the research method of “growth engineering”.

1. Mining of advertising traces

Since this is a typical App to attract new users, the first strategy that comes to my mind is advertising. According to industry rules, many entertainment apps acquire their first wave of users by placing high ROI social media ads.

According to Facebook's "transparency" policy, the advertisements placed by a certain account can actually be queried from the Facebook official database. But it turns out FaceApp isn't currently running any ads on Facebook. Didn’t it make any delivery?

I checked the third-party advertising library again. Whether it is Facebook or Instagram, the number of advertisements that can be queried is very small. Moreover, the delivery time does not match the time of the outbreak, and the content of the advertisements has nothing to do with the currently popular "aging".

（Data source: Adspy)

In addition, by querying the data from advertising platforms such as Google Display and Adwords, I found that the number of FaceApp ads is also very small, not even on the same order of magnitude as other apps.

It appears that FaceApp has indeed tested some placements, but has not been used on a large scale, and does not seem to be closely related to recent global growth. An app that spreads through the circle of friends doesn’t actually advertise on social media? Although this is a bit unreasonable, I can't find more evidence, so I can only put it aside for now.

2. Reverse landing page traffic

Next, we looked for clues from organic traffic.

Generally speaking, when this type of app is downloaded through natural traffic channels, users will first be directed to a landing page (official website homepage or subdomain) and then jump to the app store. For example, the following picture is the commonly used download page of FaceApp:

Therefore, as long as we find out where the traffic to this landing page comes from, we can understand how its natural downloads are generated. So, I dug into the entire domain traffic of FaceApp's official website to see which websites were directing traffic to the App landing page.

The data shows that in addition to mainstream channels such as Google and Facebook that can continue to bring traffic, there are also 4 very unfamiliar websites that contribute huge traffic:

(Data source: SimilarWeb)

What’s even more amazing is that not only do these websites have huge traffic of their own, but the traffic they directed to FaceApp this month has increased 50 times over the same period last year! This is a key clue.

After some research, I found that these 4 websites are very similar and all provide various fun tests.

Think about it, the "personality tests", "face tests" and so on that you often see on WeChat Moments are exactly the same in nature, and they are also popular abroad (called Quizzes).

In fact, almost all the tests on the homepage are "sponsored" by FaceApp, and I also found many tests related to "aging". Once you start the test, you can clearly see the link to the FaceApp download page (red arrow). Of course, the test is conducted entirely on the web and you will not be forced to download the app.

The test is very simple. After logging in with your Facebook account and uploading a photo, you can get a picture with the "face-changing" effect. But this actually contains multiple nodes of secondary dissemination, for example: a FaceApp watermark will be added to the image, text will guide users to the download page, and the test link can be shared to multiple social platforms with one click.

Based on these clues, testing activities should be considered one of the main strategies adopted by FaceApp recently. Through these tests, users became interested in FaceApp’s “face-changing” effects and were further directed to the download page.

On the other hand, users forwarded test results or special effects pictures (with logo watermarks) on social media, which further triggered secondary dissemination and made more people interested in FaceApp.

So, how effective is this strategy?

I happened to find that the download links placed on some activity pages were redirected via bit.ly links. In this way, you only need to add a "+" after the short link to directly view the access data of the link!

The results show that nearly a thousand people visited the link every day in the past week. Considering there are hundreds or even thousands of tests on these sites, that can add up to a lot of traffic.

(Data source: bit.ly)

Let's check in reverse to see how much traffic these four websites can bring to FaceApp:

(Data source: SimilarWeb)

A rough estimate is that in the past 12 months, the traffic directed to FaceApp from these four websites has reached 300,000, not to mention many more test websites. Although I don’t know the download conversion rate, the traffic data is still very impressive. These test game websites are closely connected and direct traffic to each other. They seem to have formed a huge site cluster, building a traffic pool for the general entertainment population - FaceApp may have noticed their value early on.

3. Find “springboard” advertising traffic

At this point, it occurred to me: Since test games are spread through social media, will FaceApp use these tests as a springboard to place social media ads?

I checked and found the clue – these tests were served as ad creatives on Facebook!

(Data source: Adspy)

This explains my initial confusion: FaceApp does not use its own official website as the main body for advertising, but relies on the advertising of test game websites to indirectly obtain downloads.

In fact, after careful research, I found that there are a large number of test game websites related to FaceApp, and the amount of advertisements placed is also very large - it has been using this strategy since 2018.

4. Find the source of the explosion on social media

Next, we have to see how it became popular on social media.

As a rule of thumb, social media is the channel most likely to cause virality. So, let's take a look at the overall changes in FaceApp's voice on social platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook: From July 13th to 20th, FaceApp's social media voice soared. On July 19, its reach reached nearly 100 million people!

(Data source: Brand24)

It can be seen that there are three key nodes: first, the spread started on July 13, second, when it showed a recession trend on July 16, it was suddenly pulled up, and finally it reached its peak on July 18-19.

1. Who was the initial trigger?

Data shows that the spread of FaceApp on social media did not start in mainstream Europe and the United States, but originated in Arabic-speaking regions such as Egypt. Later, it began to turn to Eastern Europe and America.

The picture below shows the two most likely sources of the spread, especially the blogger ASA7BE, which caused fans to post pictures crazily in the comment section. During the period from the 13th to the 16th, FaceApp was extremely popular in the Arab region, even triggering protests from clergymen, who said it "goes against God's will" and should be banned.

Of course, in Russia, FaceApp is also being spread simultaneously through VK.com, the largest local social platform.

1. How was the recession contained?

As can be seen from the graph, FaceApp’s popularity began to weaken on July 16.

It is clear that the influence of the Arab and Eastern European regions is very limited. So why has FaceApp become popular again since the 16th?

Through my research, I found that Buzzfeed and Bored Panda, the two largest entertainment media in the United States, have successively published soft articles, processing the photos of many celebrities using FaceApp. We can clearly see the FaceApp watermark in the picture.

Please note that these photos are not posted by the celebrities themselves, but are used to take advantage of their traffic. Once these two articles were published, they quickly attracted the attention of the North American public, and the spread of FaceApp rebounded.

1. How does influence reach its peak?

After July 16, FaceApp's exposure has been very high, and tags and topics such as #faceapp and #agechallenge have appeared on major mainstream social platforms.

At this point, it is the typical stage of "demand driving supply". What celebrities need most is traffic, and FaceApp is the perfect traffic tool at this time. Therefore, many first-line stars began to post their "aging" photos on social platforms and participated in related topics, such as the famous "Twilight" crew, which has 43 million fans:

Another example is the two major marketing accounts, Durex and Lego:

5. Search Traffic Mining

To sum up, social media communication can indeed bring massive exposure and brand awareness, but these KOLs did not provide download links. How does FaceApp achieve download conversion? What is the user's conversion path?

Generally speaking, after users have formed cognition, the next step is to search for information. The big logo in the picture is enough to make people search for the keyword "FaceApp". The obvious consequence is that in Google searches, the search volume for brand terms such as "FaceApp" has increased significantly, and the traffic to its official website has also increased accordingly.

However, what surprised me was that the data showed that a large proportion of users searched directly through Facebook.

Because FaceApp is directly displayed as an application in Facebook search results, and you can jump to the app store to download it with one click, so the conversion rate will obviously be very high. We can see the figures given by Facebook: 5 million users have used this app in the past month, and it seems that a large part of the tens of millions of downloads come from this.

When checking Google search traffic, I also noticed another anomaly: it was not just brand words that brought traffic, but also a lot of very strange sentences, such as: "what would I look like with beard?"

(Data source: Ahrefs)

However, there is no relevant information on the official website, only a download button. So why do users search for these sentences and come to the website?

By checking the landing pages of these sentences, I found that FaceApp’s official website actually has a lot of hidden links! These pages can only be accessed through specific URLs and there is no entry on the homepage. The unified format is faceapp.com/filters/XXXX

To be honest, the content of this page is also very interesting. In addition to arranging long-tail keywords, the main function of the page is to allow users to experience the effect of avatar conversion with one click, thereby guiding them to download the app.

Why does FaceApp do SEO for long-tail keywords?

Because these tool-type apps all face a difficult problem: once the popularity of social media passes, the number of downloads and activity will continue to decline until they disappear. But if you can use long-tail words to occupy Google, a powerful traffic entrance, you can continue to bring in users. Before this outbreak, FaceApp had actually maintained hundreds of thousands of downloads per month. Although this cannot bring about rocket-like growth, it can extend the life of the App and lay a solid foundation for the next outbreak.

VI. Conclusion

On the surface, FaceApp was just "lucky" and became popular after celebrities shared it on social media.

However, behind it is a unique growth strategy, and a huge traffic system to support it:

First, use testing websites to indirectly direct traffic to yourself, accumulate initial downloads, and then spread it through secondary sharing by users. KOLs in minority language areas were the first to be exposed to this information, which formed the initial trigger point and caused a small-scale outbreak.

Then, the mainstream media in the United States promoted it vigorously, allowing it to enter the social circles in English-speaking regions and attracting top KOLs to spread it on social media. As brand awareness increased, a large number of users began to search for brand terms and download apps, forming a global explosive trend.

Finally, FaceApp also occupies long-tail SEO traffic through a large number of pages and maintains its user base for a long time.

So why did FaceApp choose this strategy? As a small team, how can it have the ability to implement it?

The answer is simple, because FaceApp has accumulated two years of experience and can clearly determine which strategy is effective.

You may not know this, but FaceApp became extremely popular when it was first launched in 2017. The special feature at that time was to "force you to laugh": turn any portrait into a smiley face. At that time, FaceApp discovered the power of celebrity traffic and the precise channel of Buzzfeed.

In 2018, FaceApp became popular again, and its core function was "gender change": it could change the gender of any portrait. At this time, it discovered the value of social media communication and the huge traffic pool of testing websites.

(Data source: SimilarWeb)

Over the past two years, FaceApp has been continuously testing the spreadability of various features through social advertising. Although FaceApp has 28 functions, only three of them have become popular, and the remaining 25 have ended in failure.

(Data source: Adspy)

This case clearly demonstrates the theory of the "growth iceberg": in any explosive growth, the success you see is only the surface 1/8, and the other 7/8 of the deep elements are actually hidden underwater. In order for this one success to float to the surface, 1,000 failures are needed to provide buoyancy.

When our business encounters problems or seeks new growth directions, the most direct approach is to learn from the strategies of excellent cases on the market. But most of the excellent case reports and analyses we see are just the top of the iceberg. Some information has been deliberately modified, while some has been glossed over. If you act rashly and imitate blindly, you will end up drawing a dog instead of a tiger.

At this time, we need to reverse-engineer and restore every link of the excellent cases to understand how they make decisions and what scenarios they are suitable for. The details behind these growth strategies, which are unknown to the public, are an important part of the growth iceberg hidden beneath the sea.

The more competitive the business environment is, the more emphasis is placed on tapping the growth iceberg. Therefore, we are constantly improving the theory of "growth engineering" and providing research on growth strategies, tools, and methodologies, hoping to provide companies with a new perspective and help them explore the direction of growth.

Based on this idea, we established a paid community. Because we always believe that everyone needs such a community, which can help everyone dig out the growth iceberg through case analysis, Q&A and other forms, eliminate the information gap between different fields in the Internet world, cultivate overall growth thinking, and complete the upgrade of professional capabilities and company business.

If you are interested in more private case studies and offline workshops, you may want to come and experience it. In addition, the Growth Black Box Research Institute provides research services on growth trends and strategies to enterprises and investment institutions, and explores new growth opportunities through data analysis and market research. We have extensive research experience in consumer e-commerce, online education, second-hand transactions, hotel and travel, SaaS, finance, blockchain and other industries, and have served many investment institutions and listed Internet companies.

Author: Zhang Xilun

Source: Zhang Xilun ( growthbox )