When it comes to marketing, the old adage is true: Measure what Matters. Or, looking at it a different way: If It Matters, You Will Measure It. In either case, we see what is important to us and put in the effort to measure something, and as a natural consequence of our behavior, we find ourselves automatically looking for those metrics that can help us understand, compare, and improve.
It’s the same reason why we are concerned with those critical metrics in our lives. For some working on health, it might be your weight or body fat percentage. If you follow a sports team, you might be able to recall their current season record faster than your child’s birthday. However, for those metrics we rely upon to guide our actions, measuring them is absolutely essential.
In traditional marketing, you could take out ads and then observe the effects it had on traffic to your store and the increase to sales. With the age of the Internet, those metrics became more critical because you could better follow who was clicking on an ad and how far it took them toward sales conversion. This improvement allowed companies to track one of the most important metrics in marketing: Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
With an almost omniscient power like this, a company could compare different ads, different landing pages, and see exactly where they were losing customer sales. With this knowledge, a company can precision target improvements like site layout, overall look, even identify if the shopping cart is too confusing.
Combined with the growing world of AI, companies can use customer data (obtained themselves or through brokers) to better understand not just their general customer, but specific individuals who they reach. With this, the ability to individually market has never been closer.
But what about Web3? How does this relate to current marketing tools, and how are companies setting their marketing strategies to reach customers? Unfortunately, this is surprisingly difficult for a very simple reason: In order to get many customers to find your Web3 platform, you have to reach them with Web2.
Why is that difficult? Because there is a “black box” effect when customers see marketing through Web2 and decide whether or not to act on it in a Web3 space. You can’t follow an email address or some other typical identifier; even a name isn’t reliable because Web3 platforms don’t always require them.
So what can be done? Let’s explore the problem and see where certain platforms like Addressable are making some key assumptions that allow strong Web2/Web3 linkage, bringing ROAS to the Web3 marketing toolkit.
The Secret Ingredient
While there are different strategies that could be used to connect Web2 and Web3, none of them will accomplish a 100% link from every specific individual. We could continue pursuing this goal using various proxy metrics, or spend even more money trying to tease out which Web3 conversions are from specific Web2 customers.
Instead though, if we make a bold but simple assumption, we can get the best bang for our buck. As mentioned above, Web3 marketing intelligence platform Addressable has been able to distill the linkage with Web2 customers.
According to the COO and co-founder Asaf Nadler, the team found a key detail: “Our analysis reveals a striking insight: users with a crypto wallet installed are 18 times more likely to sign up and seven times more likely to convert to crypto products.”
Based on this game changer, we can look at the Web2/Web3 linkage completely differently, even considering better marketing metrics like Cost-per-Wallet over traditional metrics like Cost-per-Impression or Cost-per-Click. By focusing on the wallet itself, we can tease out the other elements that help us see the full customer.
Consider this. A Web3 platform sets up a Web2 campaign. As new customers arrive, the platform can tie wallets and gather related info such as their revenue, fees, tokens held, other activity, etc. With related conversions, the platform can find social data that can link on-chain with off-chain activity, helping the platform understand other demographics.
What can you do with this link? To be honest, companies are still experimenting to find new use cases with this method of Web3 marketing. However, the platforms that will offer this type of insight will be able to track direct effectiveness of those wallet-holders who participated in a Web2 event, and they will see the distinct effect of that campaign on the platform. This can create a true ROAS, yes, but it can also begin to tie advanced data analytics with Web3.
Next Level Marketing Strategy
The wallet-tracking approach, especially when tied with intelligent analytical tools, can help a Web3 platform not only understand their ROAS, but tailor the next steps much more precisely. First, and most obvious, the platform can see which campaigns work and don’t work.
Next, it can help identify those users who either converted and can help support their decision (invite to community events, help build brand loyalty), or try again with those who got close but didn’t finish the process. This outreach can happen now both in the Web3 world, but also through Web2 socials like X, Reddit, and more.
Probably the most interesting opportunity lies in the profile of the “great customer” and what a Web3 platform could do with it.
Addressable calls this strategy their “lookalike audience”, but regardless of platform the strategy is similar: Find those customers who stand out for their high activity and revenue generated; analyze the details around them to build a customer profile; then, using all the analytical elements of the wallet and external data, search for other wallets who fit the same profile.
This strategy will almost certainly change the game for Web3 platforms, taking them from a disadvantage compared to standard Web2 marketing and giving them an incredible advantage that shows searchable, reachable insights that Web2 can’t hope to compete with.
Looking Ahead
The ability for Web3 platforms to measure what matters is critical, and the more innovations made toward this, the more efficient and effective Web3 will become as a whole. The next step will be moving the needle on mass adoption, but for the meantime, there is plenty of work to be done with those people around the globe who’ve taken the first step and have a wallet.
As people are marketed toward what they are actually interested in, it will generate a stronger Web3 ecosystem and contribute heavily toward an interconnected, global ecosystem that has growing numbers of wallet holders every day.
Also Read: 6 Projects Building the Invisible Infrastructure Powering Web3
