Image source @pexels
Wen 丨 深火 (ID: shenrancaijing), author 丨 Li Qiuhan, editor 丨 Wei Jia
One day in early March, Zhang Dafei, who works in Beijing, was stopped by a big brother pushing his home when he passed by a shopping mall near his home. "Download the APP to send a cup," said the big brother.
He wears an orange vest with the words "Kuaishou Express Edition" printed on it, but he recommends that Zhang Dafei download the "Douyin Express Edition" APP. Just when Zhang Dafei was wondering, the eldest brother said, "Whichever one you download, there are gifts." As he spoke, he shook the tag hanging around his neck, which was a picture of a QR code printed with the logo of "Taote APP".
The eldest brother explained that they are a third-party push company, to the Internet manufacturer APP to pull new, to earn some rewards.
Shopping malls, subway entrances, schools, and communities, as long as they are places with many people, are all places where people can push people to move. Huang Li, who lives in Tianjin, met a pusher near the community when she got off work, the other party was sincere, said that she was sent to this single, hoping to help, the attitude was so enthusiastic that she could not bear to refuse, so she downloaded a fast hand express version OF APP.
And that's not even the most exaggerated. Some users shared, pushing people riding shared bicycles to pull new, not only pulling passers-by, but also knocking on the windows of vehicles parked on the side of the road, indicating that as long as they download the APP, they will give gifts. He couldn't help but sigh, "Now the Internet company Laxin is so crazy? ”
Ground push is not new. From the early takeaway, shared bicycles, taxi wars, to the recent Internet grocery shopping wars, it is indispensable to push the figure of people. The recent change is that pure online apps have also begun to use new sites, and the location is no longer limited to third- and fourth-tier cities, and at the same time, it is infiltrating into first- and second-tier cities.
This is not surprising. Judging from the financial report data recently released by a number of large manufacturers, the traffic of the Internet industry has peaked, even if it is exchanged for growth with losses, it is difficult for new users to wait, and most of them can only turn to the mining of user time.
According to the understanding of deep combustion, although the rules are different, in general, the average cost of allowing a user to download the APP through ground push is about 20 yuan, which is much lower than the cost of obtaining customers with hundreds of yuan online. At present, the use of the ground push mode to pull new, the video industry has Kuaishou Express Edition, Douyin Express Edition, B Station, the e-commerce field has Tmall, Taote, Jingdong Express Edition, the travel field has Flower Pig, AutoNavi Taxi, Cao Cao Travel, Xiaola Travel, community group buying field has Taocai cuisine, Meituan Preferred, etc. More than one person in the push industry said that the grass planting platform Xiaohongshu has also targeted the new push and pull, which is about to be launched recently.
An industry person in charge of the user growth business of a large factory told Shen Yan that this is not a benign and healthy way to obtain customers, counting the retention rate, the actual cost offline is actually higher than online. But under the pressure of traffic anxiety, Internet apps can't manage so much.
Too many APP, push the little brother "single pick up"
"Download the APP to send gifts."
According to the instructions of the big brother, Zhang Dafei downloaded the Douyin Express APP in less than two minutes and got a water cup. In this process, there are also some lively passers-by who surround them and push the big brother to start the next round of introduction.
This is not a new way to play. Recently, after the epidemic, the community group buying went to the outlet, wearing red, yellow, blue and green uniforms, the push brother ran in the streets and alleys, competing for users. Most of the previous ground pushes involved offline business, and now, under the traffic anxiety, the apps of pure online business have also used new methods of ground push and pull.
Under the fierce battle situation, the ground push brother is almost "not enough".
Lao Yang, who has been in the industry for more than two years, is now the head of the regional push team in a third- and fourth-tier city. The day before, he received three batches of customers from large factories, and the last one, chatted until 9:30 p.m. Then, he also had to settle accounts with the local push personnel and settle the accounts with three business staff, and he was busy until one or two o'clock in the morning.
"The orders of the big factories really can't be finished." Meet here today, talk to that Party A tomorrow", Lao Yang ridiculed, the industry is too hot, he feels that he is a little "inflated". Now among his customers, the video category has Kuaishou Express Edition, Douyin Express Edition, B Station, e-commerce category has Tmall, Jingdong Express Edition, etc., and the travel category includes AutoNavi Taxi, Cao Cao Travel, Xiaola Travel, and community group buying such as Taocai.
After the epidemic in 2020, he was the first to enter the industry in the local area, "at that time, he could not find a peer with a telescope", and now, his team has 50 direct employees, plus a small team of cooperation, a total of about 500 people, a day can produce 40,000 or 50,000 orders. Now, there are more teams doing local pushing.
Tang Tie began to engage in the ground push industry last year. He told Shen Yan that at first he only wanted to be a part-time job, but he did not expect to have a good income, and half a year later, he began to build a team in a third- and fourth-tier city. Now the team is about 30 people, and the maximum can promote 1300 new users a day.
He introduced that the first-level channel chamber of commerce and the platform directly dock the price and quantity, establish a community or create an exclusive APP, for the local push personnel to receive the list information, "for example, the price given by the platform is 20 yuan, the channel provider basically deducts one or two pieces on a single order, prices 18 yuan on the platform, and is issued to the following team", he said that a hard-working mother in the team has a monthly income of up to 12,000 yuan, ordinary employee income has 10,000, and some part-time promoters can earn three or four thousand a month.
At present, the main app on the market pulls the new reward price charting / deep burning
(Note: According to the oral description of the interviewee and the information of the new group, the price of different levels of teams is not completely consistent, for reference only)
"A team of 20 people, the monthly income of the team leader can reach 100,000", but he also stressed that there is a threshold for forming a team, to manage employees and advance funds, or to be a retail investor is more cost-effective.
Lao Yang introduced that the average salary in their city is only three or four thousand yuan, the average monthly income of ordinary push employees exceeds 10,000 yuan, and the head of a small team of three or four people can have a monthly income of more than 20,000 yuan.
Where does the money come from?
The answer is "platforms that are desperately hungry for users." According to the comprehensive statement of many local push personnel, although the current new rewards of various platforms are not the same, such as B station in the university to pull a new user to achieve a re-entry reward of 20 yuan, The Vibrato Speed Edition pulls a new user reward of 18 yuan, and the Kuaishou Speed Edition pulls a new user reward of 10 yuan without considering retention, but in general, the reward for pulling a new single is about 10 yuan-20 yuan.
Ground push pull new site image source / provided by the interviewee
Tang Tie introduced, laundry detergent, paper drawers, masks, dolls, is to attract passers-by to download app common gifts, most of them by their own purchase, direct docking factory low-cost goods, almost all gift cost control at about 5 yuan, "find a foundry to make a cup printed with starbucks logo, the cost price is only 2.2 yuan." Deducting the cost of gifts, a single income is also a few yuan to a dozen yuan.
For the big factories, this also seems to be a good deal. QuestMobile data shows that as of December 2021, the network has 1.174 billion users, and the coverage rate has become saturated. According to the Everbright Securities Research Report, from 2018 to 2020, Alibaba's customer acquisition cost has increased from 278 yuan to 929 yuan, and Pinduoduo has increased from 77 yuan to 203 yuan. Even if there is a new star APP with growth potential, the pressure to obtain customers is also high, according to the B station 2021 Q4 financial report, the cost of a single customer acquisition in the quarter reached 391 yuan, an increase of 84% over the same period last year of 212 yuan.
The cost of online customer acquisition is getting higher and higher, often as high as two or three hundred, while offline, it only costs a user to download the APP for a maximum of 20 or 30 yuan.
"Now that the ground push is at the cusp, all major platforms have the idea of seizing the market through ground push," Tang Tie said.
Why is the ground push popular again?
Since last year, Lao Yang has clearly felt that the platform attaches great importance to the ground push business.
At the beginning, when he entered the industry, the list was as much as it was, and now the platform has a more stringent calculation. He told deep burning, do the ground push has a special system, before carrying out the ground push to "test run", to see how the data retention in the end, and then to internal testing, and then a large area of rollout, in this process, party A's staff are involved, will say to him, "Yang Zong, today's KPI has not been completed, the chain has fallen, the re-entry is gone, the scope here is not yet covered", old Yang ridiculed, now Party A will stare at them to do the push, often have to meet to adjust the strategy, "make themselves like a big boss."
Lao Yang said that when communicating with the staff of the big factory, the other party said that the new investment in the next push and pull will continue. He speculated that in the middle of this year, there will be a larger push and pull new war, and he is stockpiling people.
This is not a business that is only beginning to gain popularity now.
Zhou Feng, head of the user growth business of a large Internet factory, told Shen Yan that at the earliest, the ground push model was mainly used to promote seed users. "At that time, you can really do it very accurately, you want to target the community users, go to the neighborhood, want to find white-collar workers, you can go to a certain business circle, want highly educated users, you can go to colleges and universities, "find a good user scenario to do push, is a good way to get seed users."
Later, in the middle of the development, the combination of scenes and scenes began to become popular, and when the O2O model (combining offline business opportunities with the Internet) was popular, it was widely used in the group purchase war, takeaway war, and shared bicycle war.
By now, the new push and pull has become more popular. This is first of all related to the context of the larger environment. "It is the consensus that the traffic peaked, but the growth pressure is still there, which is highly correlated with the stock price," Zhou Feng said. Although the number of users and revenue can not be directly equated, but the user is a leading indicator, "such as platforms like Station B, once the number of users declines, may fall after a period of time", Zhou Feng said, users are Internet APP has to compete.
Now that the online traffic dividend has disappeared, even if the algorithm that relies on the information flow recommends customers, the conversion rate is limited. "The information flow can only reach a small number of core users who are interested in the product themselves, there are many bottlenecks, and some may be recommended seven or eight times in the information flow to have a conversion," Zhou Feng said, in 2022 compared with 2019, the cost of information flow customer acquisition has almost doubled.
"The marginal effect of the investment information flow is extremely rapid, and everyone wants to grab the last wave of users who are not covered online", so offline has become a way to reach.
However, this does not mean that all apps are suitable for pushing and pulling new ones.
Zhou Feng introduced that in order to go smoothly, there need to be two conditions. One is in the process of pushing the ground, looking for places where the real business scenario will occur, such as promoting taxi APP, in the airport, railway station, to find the next order for users who use the car; followed by the national product, the user does not contradict, "these two conditions must be met, otherwise it is difficult to have retention."
At the same time, this puts forward requirements for the offline management of large factories. First, it is necessary to control the business processes in various places, and to push and pull new product tools and data statistics; secondly, the user's path cannot be cut off by Party B, and the user needs to be able to find the platform in real time if he has problems; at the same time, he also needs employees to check and secretly visit to understand the real data situation.
In the past, the O2O model involved offline business, and related large manufacturers also had experience in pushing the ground, but for pure online Internet APP, there was a threshold. Online platform companies such as Douyin, Kuaishou and Station B are "not so finely controlled" compared to large factories that started offline, Zhou Feng said.
Now, the relationship between the big factory and the local push is delicate. At present, the essence of competition is still to compete with who gives subsidies and generous rewards.
Lao Yang said that they will not be too close to which big factory, but see which industry is fiercely fighting, they will lean on which industry, because many of the new pulling of large factories are short-term business, only pointing to one, "it will be very painful." In the community group buying war, their team took over almost all the business of large factories, including Meituan Preferred, Duoduo Buy, Orange Heart Preferred, Tongcheng Life, Jingxi Spelling, Hema Fresh Life, etc., and now the situation is similar, "I always emphasize that we are very neutral," he said.
When talking about cooperation with large factories, he will clearly tell each other at the meeting, and he has also taken over the business of competing products, and what can be guaranteed is that the same batch of people will not be used.
Push team to take orders platform image source / APP screenshot
But at the execution level, most of the people who take orders are retail investors, that is, they are not the staff of a certain push team, but just the individuals who receive orders, they are aiming at what rewards are more, regardless of whether the competitors are competing or not.
For example, many local pushers are mainly pushing Taote, Douyin Express Edition, and Kuaishou Express Edition, because of the high public awareness and relatively generous rewards, but there are direct competitors. Zhang Xiaofei recalled the deep burning, when he met the big brother in the mall, the vibrato speed version, the fast hand speed version APP are pushed, the reason why he chose to download the vibrato speed version, is because the push big brother recommended the most vigorous, he can get the ground push reward is relatively higher.
Tang Tie chose the main push Taote, one is the real benefit of the product, and the other is that after the user downloads the promotion code through the scanning channel, he can buy a single for free on the corresponding interface online, that is to say, the benefits to the user, the platform has been provided, and the push can save the cost of gifts.
Just like the community group buying war, whoever has more subsidies, the leader of the group will go where, and the final competition is the supply chain. When everyone is promoting, "users get similar gifts, and they can get real benefits on which APP, it is easier to accept which APP," Tang Tie said. In the end, it is still up to the product to meet the new needs of users.
How useful can it be to push the ground?
So, is ground push really the traffic antidote to app traffic in the Internet industry?
After downloading the Vibrato Express Edition, Zhang Xiaofei brushed it for a while at night, and found that the use experience was similar to that of Douyin, "I think there is no need to install two identical APPS in the mobile phone", so I uninstalled it. Huang Li did not uninstall the Kuaishou Express Edition, but after downloading, it was rarely opened.
Under the anxiety of traffic, some apps that seem to focus on third- and fourth-tier cities are also pulling new ones in first- and second-tier cities. For example, Alibaba has Taobao with a high coverage rate, but it is promoting Tmall, Taote, ByteDance, and Kuaishou each have Douyin and Kuaishou, but they push similar express versions to users, and the platform seems to have new users, but it is also very likely to be repeat users.
"The core of growth is retention", Zhang Tian, the person in charge of user growth of a large factory, said to Shen Yan that the difficulty of pushing is not the push itself, but to see whether the product can retain users, "regardless of the retention rate, either the product itself is well retained, or the platform does data brushing."
Push and pull new customers, the unit price does seem low, but it does not necessarily become a retention user. The big factories also want to increase the retention rate, but it is extremely difficult.
Tang Tie introduced that the Kuaishou Express Edition was previously pulled to a user to download, and there was a reward of about 18 yuan. Now, a single reward has slipped to 10 yuan, and more rewards are tilted to the "re-entry", that is, the user who pulls it back, and then uses it for 7 consecutive days, can reward another 20 yuan, plus other series of rewards, a user can make them earn up to 46 yuan.
He said that in order to get the reward of "re-registration", some local push personnel began to start a community, plus the other party's WeChat, prompting 7 consecutive days of login, after achieving the goal, users can receive a gift sent by The Kuaishou Mall. However, this is not very attractive to Tang Tie, "the follow-up reward can only be lucky", he said, whether users continue to use the APP is beyond their control, most of the team is more willing to get the income that can look into the pocket, "otherwise the cost can not be controlled."
Apps that emphasize the recurrence rate are also not very popular in the local push industry. A number of local push personnel said that in many APP, station B has higher requirements for crowds and re-entry rates, and must be young people on campus, either pulling new numbers according to the number of re-entry, or the next day's re-entry rate should reach 10%, and there is no benefit if it is not achieved. One push employee mentioned that this list has been on their platform for two months, and they are willing to do very little push, and recently they simply took it down.
Zhou Feng once made detailed statistics, and the business he was in at the time was "very poor in the retention of push users." It's not like online, where you're directed to meet the criteria. Offline, push companies in order to make money, mostly do not screen users. "Running to the street, setting up a stall to push and pull new, just pursuing user numbers," Zhou Feng said.
Internet companies want the higher the quality of users, the better, but most of the companies only pursue scale. "Although the cost of pushing and pulling new individual users is very low, but counting the repurchase, we have calculated that the cost of obtaining truly valuable users is actually not cost-effective," Zhou Feng said, in terms of his business line, "judging by real and effective users, effective users obtained offline are more than 10 points more expensive than users obtained online through the information flow advertising funnel." ”
This kind of way is rolled out, and the platforms are converging on the gameplay of pushing customers through the ground, and the cost may also be getting higher and higher.
"For example, the 20-30-year-old group in first- and second-tier cities, it is difficult to produce conversion behavior because of gifts", Feng Yun is engaged in business related to user growth, and the big factory where she is located is adopting the ground to push and pull new, she said that there are few high-quality users themselves, and the play methods of each family tend to be single, "If you want to get a long-term user who only uses one APP, you need higher cost maintenance, or better content to undertake, and the cost is definitely getting higher and higher."
Zhou Feng also mentioned that it seems convenient to use the land to push and pull the new, but once the operation is improper, it will add a lot of trouble to the big factory. In the process of implementation, some push personnel in order to obtain revenue brush orders, and some ground push personnel in order to induce users to download will use deceptive means, and even some people in the name of the platform fraud, many users do not know that the push personnel from third-party companies, but think that it is a large factory, "causing unnecessary trouble and management problems to the brand."
When a user receives a gift, it carries a loan business card from the source / provided by the interviewee
A user said that when downloading the APP to get a gift, the pusher stuffed a business card for the loan business, saying that the loan could also find her. Another user mentioned to Shen Yan that after downloading a certain express version of the APP, the other party said that filling in the information on the system can get gift tissues, but after filling in, the other party said that it was necessary to log in for 7 consecutive days to get it, he felt that he was fooled, and the other party replied, "I don't lie to you, can you get it?" ”
Zhou Feng sighed, now under the anxiety of growth, "Everyone has to use some ways that previously felt that the cost performance was not high to pull new." ”
"Many times, you think very beautifully, think that the push can talk about the product, plus send gifts, the user is willing to download, but the high probability is the Tui na user's mobile phone operation, the user downloaded the head to delete, nothing happened," he said.
Note: At the request of the interviewee, all names in this article are pseudonyms.