The Logic of Traffic

How many traffic logic principles are there?

1. High-frequency taps low-frequency.

Pinduoduo's rise was successful because its categories were food. For example, my dad loves buying garlic, and my mom loves snapping up fruit. Even though a lot of it goes bad, she can't resist the temptation of Pinduoduo.

Food, everyone's three meals a day… surely that's higher frequency than buying clothes, right?

The category Taobao won with is clothing. Girls are always swapping, swapping, swapping, buying, buying, buying… surely that's higher frequency than JD.com's 3C products? The replacement frequency of digital devices is never as high as changing clothes.

This is high frequency. Only things with higher frequency—meaning the number of times used within a given period—can generate traffic.

Take Taobao at its current scale, it still needs tons of traffic to sustain. As for JD.com? Advertising spend would only grow even more.

Meituan started with food. Look how comfortable Meituan is now. Especially after the food delivery wars pretty much ended, I almost never see Meituan needing to run ads. Instead, it leveraged the traffic from food to build up other businesses.

So in the e-commerce sector, it must be small, high-frequency hits driving traffic to support the sales of high-profit products to make up for it.

This logic is very practical.

High frequency brings traffic, low frequency brings profit.

Content e-commerce, which everyone's been spouting about, is the same. It's all about relying on high-frequency push notifications to wake up users and convert them.

Why is Tencent so powerful?

Because humans are social animals. Consumption is low-frequency, chatting is high-frequency. That's why Alibaba is envious of Tencent's traffic.

微信's user time is higher than other products' time, which pretty much explains the problem.

2. Free traffic is more interesting than paid traffic.

On one hand, free traffic is hard to operate. On the other hand, the results of free traffic are long-lasting.

Hard because wherever the traffic is, you dig for traffic there.

Long-lasting because once you build a stable free traffic channel, it basically keeps bringing you traffic non-stop. For example, SEO, or highly-upvoted answers on Zhihu, both persistently generate traffic.

Paid traffic is like feeding it a bit and it goes a bit. If you cut off its food supply, immediately no customers come in.

Find high-frequency traffic-opening channels, farm the traffic.

Use low-frequency to profit.

Use free traffic for long-term operations.

Use paid traffic for rapid experimentation.