What Is “Private Traffic”?

1. What is Private Traffic?

First, we need to understand what Public Traffic is. Public traffic is open to everyone, such as offline traffic, BAT（Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent）traffic, like WeChat, QQ, Tmall, Taobao, Baidu, Douyin, Kuaishou, Weibo, JD, Toutiao, Pinduoduo, etc., and platforms that are relatively in silos but also have plenty of traffic, such as Zhihu, Jian Shu, Baby tree, Xiaohongshu, etc.

For Private Traffic, it is a controllable traffic pool based on the “public traffic” platform. Let’s take WeChat as an example, for each WeChat public account, WeChat group and WeChat personal account, fans and friends are “Private traffic”, as these can be independently operated and maintained by the account owners who have WeChat public group, and personal account.

Private traffic is mainly for the management of user relationships. According to the level of the relationship, it can be divided into 4 levels (from low to high):

4th Tier: Fans

• The lowest rated “private traffic” are fans on social accounts such as WeChat public accounts, Weibo, and Toutiao. This is the initial level of “private traffic”, but also the lowest-rated level of the trust relationship.
• Fans-type “private traffic” – Where information received is one-way, relying on operators to continue output of content to maintain retention, and the conversion effect will be better if the content matches the interest of fans. This is also the operating logic of the WeChat public account (WeChat Subscription Account Mainly)

2nd Tier: Friends

• A deeper level of “Private traffic” than a community is direct friend relationships, mainly WeChat friends. Because WeChat is the most important instant messaging tool in China at present, and it includes the majority of social relationships.
• Friends-type “private traffic” is the most discussed type of “private domain traffic” at present. The main reason is it has the highest degree of trust and the best conversion effect because friends communicate directly and frequently, and trust is the key element. As long as solid operations and regular product recommendations are maintained, there will be good monetisation benefits.

2. How to make use of “Private Traffic”?

The operational steps of “Private Traffic” are Referral traffic > Fission > Convert > Purchase > Repurchase. In this process, fission is considered to be the most characteristic marketing method. There are 2 key steps for fission; step 1 is designing a complete mechanism to close the loop (sharing—convert); step 2 is giving enough incentive to cooperate.

  Common Fission Methods:

Group Buying

Group leader and members purchase product at a price lower than the original. Suitable for the product with a higher repurchase rate and low unit price.

During the epidemic, e-commerce mini programs turned customers into their own “sales staff” by offering a commission and achieving good results in the form of Distribution sales. Currently, the most popular method is “mini program + live streaming + private traffic (community + friends)”, which generates rapid purchases and orders.

The most common form of live streaming is one of the private communities. In recent years, tens of thousands communities were accumulated. The following are private community cases based on referral traffic for different live streaming campaigns.

SaSa Hong Kong (WeChat group of Beauty, Shopping and Parenting)

Mead Johnson Hong Kong (Group of Mothers)

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Contact us for a better understanding of live streaming traffic and utilisation of WeChat’s private traffic.