Is traffic really becoming more and more expensive?

In this article, the author will answer for you: Why does traffic seem to be getting more and more expensive? How should enterprises reasonably utilize traffic to maximize its value? How to get private domain traffic? These questions.

Since May, I have been thinking about a question: Is traffic really becoming more and more expensive as the industry says?

The term private domain traffic has been around since 2017, but it only became popular this year. In 2017, didn’t companies need to build their own private traffic pools?

Yes, but not that important since traffic is so cheap in 2017.

The number of Internet users in China increased from 730 million at the beginning of 2017 to 820 million at the end of 2018. Why did the traffic decrease while the number of users increased by 100 million?

So, I led my colleagues in the department's project team to carry out this research on traffic changes. It took two months, and we surveyed 2,000 users and multiple content industry business managers, and wrote the "2019 Content Industry Semi-annual Report."

The report contains the following findings, which may answer the question of "traffic is becoming more and more expensive":

1. Content is no longer just a business to attract attention. All industries have joined the traffic competition in the content industry.
2. There are more and more marketing methods. It’s not that the traffic is less, but that you don’t know how to use them.
3. Don’t just give up on tens of millions of public accounts, because you still haven’t seen half of the long-tail traffic.
4. Information flow advertising is an algorithmic business. For the same advertisement, some people pay 600 yuan for acquiring customers, while others pay only 100 yuan.
5. Men are worse than dogs? But they also need to shop and be “planted with ideas”;
6. Live streaming e-commerce is not a traffic business, it is an e-commerce logic;
7. If you have a personal account, it will be blocked. From a business perspective, you should not rely too much on it;
8. Private domain traffic is a systematic project, and it cannot be achieved by simply setting up a new media department.

Next, I will answer the three questions mentioned at the beginning based on this report:

1. Why does traffic seem to be getting more and more expensive?
2. How should enterprises reasonably utilize traffic to maximize its value?
3. How to get private domain traffic?

1. Why does traffic seem to be getting more and more expensive?

This story starts with BAT.

The reason why BAT has become the three giants of the Internet is that they occupy the three most important traffic channels of the Internet: social networking that connects people to people, search that connects people to information, and e-commerce that connects people to goods.

The reason why the Big Three were able to develop into the Big Three is that these three traffic channels did not interfere with each other in the early and rapid development periods of the Internet: making friends does not affect my search for information, nor does it affect my purchases.

In the past two years, these three channels have begun to be connected: in the process of making friends, public accounts are used to transmit information and recommend products, after buying something, you can see the store information on Weitao, and algorithm recommendations have changed the original way of searching and obtaining information.

"Content" has suddenly become an important way to connect multiple traffic channels. It has begun to integrate into all walks of life, supplying traffic to enterprises like blood vessels.

The content industry, which was originally only valued by a few people, has suddenly become a treasure that the entire industry is competing for.

As a result, wealthy and noble families competed to copy it, and the price of paper in Luoyang became expensive.

——"Book of Jin·Literary Garden·Biography of Zuo Si"

One reason is that there are more people competing for traffic, and another reason is that the marketing budget is low.

Advertisers cannot be blamed for this. The Internet economy has reached a stage where it can no longer solve its problems by using the old barbaric growth approach.

ROI

This word deserves to be bolded and magnified. Corresponding to ROI is the input-output ratio and the refined operation of traffic: whether an investment of 1 yuan can get an output of 1.2 yuan is a question that the company must calculate clearly before spending any money.

2. How to do it?

Official accounts, product recommendations, information flow advertising and live e-commerce.

Old wine in new bottles? Let me tell you some of our new discoveries, and you’ll find that this is a way of “putting new wine in old bottles”.

Public Account

Account blocking, information flow revision, decreased open rate... these pessimistic voices have been around for at least a year. If you are following the crowd, it means you have not seen the whole picture of the official account.

We calculated the data in the Xinbang official account database and divided all articles into two parts according to the number of readings, with 10,000 as the dividing line. Those above 10,000 are considered the head, and those below 10,000 are considered the middle and long tail.

In terms of quantity, mid- and long-tail articles account for 97% of the total number of articles, and these articles contribute 50.2% of the total reading volume.

In other words, half of the traffic in the entire public account ecosystem is something you have never been exposed to!

Last year, data revealed that the current number of public accounts has reached 30 million, but Xinbang only monitors about 1 million accounts on a daily basis, and most of them are high-quality accounts. In other words, the figures of 97% and 50.2% should be even larger in the actual WeChat public account traffic!

We exported the data of companies with an investment of more than 100,000 yuan and calculated the cost and exposure. Some companies can achieve 0.3 cents per exposure. There is no cheaper traffic than this.

Information flow advertising

This is an algorithm business, which means we can reach it by understanding algorithm optimization. The value of information flow advertising lies in that the targets are all labeled people, and you can use labels to choose to accurately reach the people you want to reach.

The "China Internet Development Report 2019" released by the Internet Association a few days ago gave the share distribution of the domestic Internet advertising market. Information flow advertising is about to surpass search advertising to become the second advertising market.

Information flow advertising is a good channel, but you have to understand one thing: it is a meticulous job, not something you can just do and be done with. For the same advertisement, some people only spend 100 to acquire customers, but when you have to spend 600, you should know that "it's not that this thing can't do, it's that you can't do it."

Planting grass

Let me say something that C-end users may not want to hear: when doing business on the Internet, you cannot treat everyone equally.

Men and women are different, and rookies and veterans are different.

There is no need to explain the differences between men and women, but you need to think clearly about the difference between rookies and veterans. An irresponsible estimate is that half of our country's Internet users have been online for less than two years, and more than half of them are "elderly Internet users." Their mentality towards surfing the Internet is different from yours when you first learned how to surf the Internet three or five years ago. They don’t have a lot of scheming in mind. They will easily fall into your "trap".

Regarding the method of planting grass, there is a piece of data that can more or less support this inference: half of the netizens will directly complete the purchase through the link provided in the content that is planted.

Of course, we cannot rule out the main reasons such as the excellent effect of grass-planting and the high acceptance of grass-planting by users, but I haven’t found any major loopholes in my reasoning on this matter.

Next, let’s look at the men and women surfing the Internet.

We conducted a gender cross-analysis on the 2,000 netizens we surveyed and found that the focus of this issue is not just on girls; boys are still likely to be the ones to be influenced by this issue.

Without mentioning the percentage of boys who were attracted by beauty products and clothing, let’s take a look at the conversion rates of 3C digital products and automobiles, both of which exceeded 10%. Xiaohongshu officials also admitted that the popularity of technology and digital content is increasing rapidly.

When doing business, you can't just follow the crowd, you have to differentiate yourself. When everyone is trying to find girls, it's also a good choice to try boys.

Live streaming sales

Let me first state a point of view, which may not be correct: live streaming e-commerce is not a new media business, but an extension of the e-commerce business.

Therefore, dear bosses, you must always remind yourself of this when you try to take advantage of the live e-commerce traffic. The core of e-commerce is product selection and pricing. If you don't know how to distribute the products such as traffic-generating funds, activity funds, profit funds and image funds , I advise you not to touch this business.

Back to live streaming e-commerce, I guess the popularity of this thing should be attributed to the rise of “small town tycoons”.

Looking at the growth trend of disposable income and consumer expenditure, it can be said that the gray "small town tycoons" have been suppressing the cities for five years.

So, do you know why Li Jiaqi has been chasing after Wei Ya?

The city is full of tricks, I want to go back to the countryside. We rural people not only have money, but also are willing to shop. Judging from the conversion rate of live e-commerce, the conversion rate of third-tier and below cities is nearly 10 percentage points higher than that of first-tier cities.

The most miserable are the second-tier cities, where people dare not look or buy...

Live streaming is a good business, but not everyone can do it. Among our 2,000 respondents, 80.7% said they don’t watch fixed anchors. What really facilitates a transaction is not the anchor’s appearance, but the price-performance ratio of the product.

This is an e-commerce product selection business. Before the broadcast, it has to go through product selection, supply chain selection, and ROI calculation; after the goods are sold, there must be logistics, after-sales and other supporting services.

To put it bluntly, the host's face can only be regarded as a "flyer".

3. Private Domain Traffic

What to do? It must be done, but the method must be appropriate.

What we talked about before are all public domain traffic. "You must first have a ladle among the vast ocean of water." However, there is no need for private domain traffic, because that is private water that is already in a bucket. You can drink it through a tube, boil it and then drink it, or make tea, boil soup, or even distill, make soda, and brew wine.

What barrels are used?

You need a bucket before you can hold water. I suggest you use the "WeChat brand", which can hold food, does not leak, and keeps food fresh. To put it in professional data terms, it means low customer acquisition costs, strong controllability and high retention.

WeChat ≠ personal account.

Some time ago, I wrote an article about the private domain traffic tools officially provided by WeChat. At that time, it was just a guess, but after inquiring from many sources, I found that they were all feasible. This leads to a conclusion: WeChat is not cracking down on private domain traffic, but on those crazy personal marketing accounts.

Private domain traffic is a systematic project

How to get the most out of public domain traffic, how to make the money you get out of it worthwhile, and how to keep the money in your traffic pool?

This series of things cannot be accomplished by simply "arranging" employees from the new media department to do it.

We have previously talked about the value of mid- and long-tail public accounts and information flow ads, and we can put them to use here.

In addition to the cases above, I suggest that you read the article "Learn from Whom to Learn". After reading it, you will understand what "finely build a private domain traffic pool" means.

Next, address the retention issue.

In fact, most of the time, you can start monetizing during retention.

Strategies such as sending red envelopes and coupons have been proven to be useless. Most users will unfollow your official account directly after receiving the coupons, and then follow back when they need them. But it would be different if you could provide a continuous supply of interesting content.

Content not only retains users, but also tags them through their reading behavior. Tagged users are not just simple "traffic". You can push products to them based on their needs or even sell things to them directly.

This is the private domain traffic pool. If it is only filled with a private account of 5,000 people, not to mention how much revenue can be brought by the pitiful conversion rate of the circle of friends, how can we ensure that 20 WeChat accounts with 100,000 fans will not be blocked? I carry 20 mobile phones with me every day and can’t even get into the subway…

Put it in the company? If you don’t know the most basic account blocking strategies such as Wi-Fi, base station positioning, physical positioning, and life trajectory, how do you have the courage to engage in private domain traffic?

Author: Xixin

Source: Xixin