3 things to know about user growth: data, value, and goals

Today I will talk about growth, mainly based on my short but rich career experience. I will talk about the three things related to growth that I think are the most important: data, value and goals.

01

Growth can be understood as a process, and the process serves the goal. Once the goal is set and we think from beginning to end, we will know what growth strategy to choose.

Do we really understand the goals? In other words, when the product manager's level has not reached a certain level and when the level he is at prevents him from obtaining the information necessary to determine the goals, can he understand the goals?

For example, when I was at Dianping, it was the first year of the product, and the team assigned me to work on the VIP business, with the goal of increasing the VIP base.

For me, the growth of the VIP base is my goal, and this goal is the beginning of a series of actions I take. But my beginning was the result of the top. Starting from the strategic transformation of the group, they gradually broke down the actions at their level and found that they needed to carry out VIP product operations.

If I understand the ins and outs of the goal, I will understand that in the process of growth, the core variables to grasp are the quantity and quality of content, rather than just the base number. This understanding is very important and determines our strategy.

Secondly, have we found the right target? Growth itself can be seen as an objective action, and the growth of XX can convey a precise meaning. For example, the growth in the number of users, the growth in content, the growth in GMV, the growth in retention rate, etc. Of course, these subjects are not independent of each other, and many times they are in a formula.

For example, GMV=new users*conversion rate*average order value+old users*retention rate*conversion rate*average order value. If we take the growth on both sides of the equation, the growth of GMV is related to many factors such as the conversion rate of users with different attributes, average order value, etc.

However, one of the most difficult things is to find the most important short-term growth goals based on the current actual situation of the product.

When I was at Duodian, I was responsible for a marketing channel from 0 to 1. For a new channel, growth is imperative. Whether it is the number of users, transaction volume, browsing time or visit depth, all need to be improved comprehensively. But we can’t do all these things at the same time. We can’t use different methods to improve conversions when traffic is low, nor can we do off-site delivery when the experience needs to be improved.

So I had a discussion with my boss. For an e-commerce marketing channel, sufficient products, promotions, activities, and coupons are the core to attract users to come in and browse, and keep them browsing for as long as possible, thereby generating sales conversions.

Therefore, in the early stages, we set the growth goal as the number of SKUs and connecting more brands and products. To this end, we optimized the product structure and broke it down into front-end display and back-end brand access.

On the road to growth, we have many tools and methodologies to use, but I think the most difficult thing is to give up and focus, and to realistically set a real goal that can be broken down into actions based on the stage of the product.

02

With a goal in mind, the next step is to break down the actions.

When I am making a product, I will think over and over again about what problems the actions I take solve for which users in what scenarios.

Using the same example, if I want to increase the visit time of the channel page and keep users browsing longer, I have a lot of ready-made tools. The most crude way is to create a task system, using the number of channel page visits and visit duration as one of the task indicators. Completing tasks will earn you points, which can be exchanged for merchandise. This gameplay sounds familiar, right?

There are many such ways to play on the market, such as receiving red envelopes by watching videos and withdrawing cash by completing tasks. It is undeniable that this is also one of the strategies, which is to quickly attract a large number of users through subsidies in the short term, and then retain the core users among them through refined operations.

But again, our actions directly reach users, and as a product manager you still need to think clearly about what problems we have solved for which users in what scenarios.

In our channel page, users come in to buy branded products with better value for money. Our goal is to solve the needs of users who have daily necessities and miscellaneous goods purchases, and help them find more desirable products while pursuing cost-effectiveness and quality.

Based on this value, the breakdown of the action is more natural: more complete brands, more complete products, and more complete activities. If we want more brands, we need to optimize the brand access process. If we want more products, we need to optimize the front-end display. If we want more activities, we need to optimize the capture and display of coupons and activities.

At this time, the growth goals become demands that can be implemented immediately.

How to find the value corresponding to the goal? It can be broken down into three elements: users, scenarios, and pain points.

Users are divided into individuals and groups. In-depth interviews correspond to individual users in the user research stage. What we know is the real demands of a specific user and we abstract a typical portrait from this specific user.

For example, a typical user of a brand marketing channel page may be a housewife between the ages of 35 and 40 who is responsible for the daily necessities and miscellaneous expenses of the family. At this time, we can contact a real user for an in-depth interview.

The advantage of focusing on individuals is that through one example, we can understand the three elements of users, scenarios, and pain points at once. If you talk to her, you will always be able to find something out.

But the individual risk is that everyone’s life is different, and paying too much attention to the value demands of a single sample may lead to a deviation in our understanding of overall values.

User group is a statistical concept that represents the inclinations and trends of a group of people. In user research, the corresponding concept is the questionnaire. This may be a more familiar way of acquiring value for product managers.

By conducting surveys and research to understand what most users think, we can, to a certain extent, ensure that what we produce will be accepted by most users, which is very safe.

But we may lose a kind of sensitivity, which is the ability to capture demands through our empathy beyond statistics and mathematical methods.

Both individual users and user groups have their own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to acquiring value. As I said, there are many methodologies and tools, but the core is that we know that we must achieve growth goals around value, rather than imposing methodology for the sake of growth.

03

After breaking down the actions based on value, we will implement them. There are many things to talk about in the process of implementing growth needs, but what I want to talk about most is data. In my opinion, when actually achieving growth, we cannot avoid the effects and reasons. Regardless of the effect or the cause, it is inseparable from data, and further, it is inseparable from embedding points and attribution.

Tracking points is a basic skill for product managers. Compared to drawing prototypes, I personally think tracking points may be more important. I suggest that if you really want to achieve growth, you must pay attention to the placement of points.

First, differentiate channels based on embedding points. Everyone understands this principle. Only by recording where the users come from can we know which channel has the highest quality.

When I was working on membership growth at Dianping, one of the actions I took was to improve and optimize the reach channels to make users more sensitive to their identity and guide them to mainly complete the renewal of their membership status.

At that time, my boss told me that we should establish a monitoring mechanism for the data of each channel reached and have an understanding of every bullet fired.

Second, drill down based on the buried points. We will record the actions taken by the user in the event, and specify the additional information about the user or action in the attributes. For example, the user’s geographic location, the amount of the payment order, etc. If we don’t do these placements well, it will be almost impossible to drill down to do user stratification analysis in different regions, or to find the average order value range with the highest conversion rate.

Third, carry out cross-platform integration based on tracking points. For C-end products, the growth formats are likely to be very rich, including in-site growth of the APP main site, social fission based on H5 or mini-programs, and even traffic from third-party platforms. A single user may interact with products in different business formats, but this user is always a specific entity. When analyzing this user, it is necessary to conduct an integrated analysis based on the user's behavior in different business formats, so that the conclusions obtained are often more comprehensive.

After the placement is done, the next important step is to do attribution analysis. Attribution is about figuring out what triggers a user to take a certain action.

Suppose a user clicks on four banners in succession and browses the corresponding landing pages, each of which contains product A, and finally the user purchases product A. In this case, how should we understand the role of each banner?

From a strategic perspective, the most cost-effective action is to find the landing page corresponding to the banner with the greatest influencing factors and optimize the design and expand the traffic. But how do we define the most influential factor?

It could be the first one, it could be the last one, or they could have different weights. It’s hard to tell. Even if you ask the user, he may not be able to clearly tell you the exact moment when he decided to buy product A. This requires product managers who are responsible for growth to establish attribution models that are more relevant to their own businesses, find the most important growth factors and take continuous action. More importantly, through attribution, knowing how much benefit different growth cost investments have generated is very helpful for estimating the ROI of growth.

To sum up, in the process of implementing growth actions, product managers need to do a lot of things. Among them, I think the most important thing is to lay a good data foundation. The first is to do a good job of embedding points, and the second is to find a suitable attribution model.

04

The above is roughly what I want to share about growth: finding the right goals, finding user value consistent with the goals, and laying a good data foundation are three things that I think product managers need to pay special attention to when doing growth.

These understandings may not be accurate. After all, I do not have complete growth-related project experience, so I can only give some thoughts based on some of my more fragmented C-end product experiences.

If it is useful, I will be very happy; if not, just take it as a casual chat.

Author: Dalige

Source: Dalige Job Search