The mass adoption of crypto is an irreversible process – the number of users is growing year-on-year both on decentralized platforms (active blockchain wallets on major chains), as well as on centralized platforms, such as ecosystems, trading, and lending services.
Does it mean that it’s easy to promote new and existing products in such a growing market? That’s not really the case, as the existing crypto users and constantly bombarded with various ads and they’ve seen it all a thousand times, while new users always have misconceptions about crypto while being increasingly wary of its caveats, lack of security, honest players in the market and cycle-dependent bubbles.
We sat down with Alex, Performance Marketing Manager at Ninjapromo to find out what channels work, what trends in user acquisition still hold strong, and what is expected to change this year in PPC marketing in particular.
Paid traffic channels in 2024
- The flagship channels that give the highest quality leads are Google and Meta, that’s where the most paying customers are to be found. The instruments that allow performance marketers to fine-tune their campaigns also happen to be in place on these platforms, both in the form of built-in and 3rd party instruments. Google and Meta are great when it comes to finding both experienced and new web3 users.
- Twitter and Tiktok sit somewhere between the best and the niche traffic sources and do not yield anything but mediocre results while having difficult-to-bypass moderation policies in place.
- There are niche traffic sources for crypto users that Ninjapromo is experimenting with, such as Coinzilla or Brave browser, but they still can not replace Google and Meta and end up working out more expensively.
- Last but not least, there is a new player now, Telegram ads, which combines a great user base with flexible promotion options for web3 products. It will eventually allow it to join Google and Meta on the list of tier 1 sources, but only when it comes to web3.
Landing pages and user funnels
It’s just as important to note that every paid ad leads somewhere and talk about user funnels and landing pages. There is a tendency for higher quality over simplicity, a one-pager landing site created on Tilda will not convert as well in 2024 as a fully-fledged landing page with an explainer video and high-quality content, as well as bespoke animations (not the kind every web3 user has seen that can be implemented by default in many site creation services). Users have seen it all a thousand times and only something on a radically new level of quality can catch their eye, before the project itself catches their attention.
In relation to this fact, there’s a point to be made. Slava Kasperovich, co-founder at Ninjapromo, says, “A great source of leads for many crypto projects in 2024 are, in fact, not overpriced web3 influencers, but regular, call them web2, influencers with relatively low CPM. It’s a brilliant idea for startups looking to bridge the gap between non-crypto savvy persons and blockchain-powered mass-adoption-ready services. We’re helping many of our clients not overlook this, and the results are great.”
Restrictions and bans
Promoting crypto products is still tricky in 2024. According to moderation playbooks of Google and Meta, which the companies try to keep uniform, company advertising policy usually overrides the regional legislation, e.g. if your particular country allows crypto products to exist and be promoted legally, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to do so on Meta.
A lot of people, and our potential clients, don’t know that both Meta and Google allow the promotion of web3-related products in certain cases conditionally, provided that a company can present a certain license, but most companies can not obtain those for various reasons. What’s left for them to do?
A lot of advertising intermediaries, such as Ninjapromo.io know all the ins and outs of the business and can bypass the moderation rules reasonably well, and by quite honest methods at that. There are methods, formats, different trigger words to be avoided and so on, and so forth, but at the end of the day, one can avoid all the pitfalls of promoting web3 products on both Google and Meta, and get their message across to their potential customers more or less intact, you just have to be an expert in it or leverage the expertise of an agency with a decent track record.
What to expect in 2024?
Google and Meta will remain by a long shot the best-paid traffic sources, while Telegram can only realistically hope to match them in the web3 segment. A lot will hinge on how it develops as a social media, and in which countries it gains traction.
After introducing overly strict policies around 2018-2019 that negatively affected both the ill-willed and the honest actors on the web3 market, the media giants, such as Meta and Google are starting to slowly tone their strictness down. However, they’re too big and cherish their reputation too much to make quick decisions and just lift bans on certain topics on certain platforms in the blink of an eye. There probably won’t be any significant changes in 2024, and roughly the same limitations will apply in most platforms and in most jurisdictions, so if you’re looking to employ PPC marketing in your web3 user acquisition campaigns, you are much better off letting professionals handle it.
George Proshin is an experienced content, community, and marketing manager with focus on blockchain (Web3, crypto) and esports. He has participated in fundraising campaigns and day-to-day SMM and PR activities across several projects and startups.
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