Most DApps today target users familiar with the blockchain space, relying on others to shoulder the burden of expanding adoption. In view of the high cost and extreme difficulty of onboarding users who do not possess a wallet, 2key’s user-friendly funnel to create and use a wallet deserves praise as it benefits the entire space.
Technically, 2key Network achieves this feat by turning each user browser into a node with a non-custodial wallet as soon as the user clicks on a SmartLink. The user can then earn 2KEY by sharing SmartLinks or purchase ETH easily with a credit card to create a SmartLink campaign.
This begs the question, what is a SmartLink?
SmartLinks are the blockchain way to combine the magic of the Refer-a-Friend system with the ease-of-use of PPC campaign. In direct competition with Google and Facebook, SmartLinks tackle issues that web 2.0 is technically unable or partially able to address such as:
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Multi-step referral
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Large scale automated micropayments
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Fraud prevention
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GDPR compliant tracking and recording through ID anonymization
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Redistributing ad wealth to people instead of filling corporation pockets
Before getting any further, let’s have a quick look at:
1. What are the current problems with PPC and Refer-a-Friend campaigns?
2. How do SmartLink solve the current problems?
What are the current problems with PPC and Refer-a-Friend campaigns
Current PPC campaigns issues:
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PPC campaigns, AKA search advertising, are so popular that it led to an impressive $106.5 billion global spending in 2019. With the current Web 2.0 service providers, up to 25% of that budget might be eaten up by ad fraud.
Keyword CPC price fluctuation: To make matters worse, clicks’ ROI is correlated to the Cost per Click, which is highly dependent on the selected keywords. As keyword bidding wars generate wide fluctuations in the price of the click, whether because of competitors or unrelated events such as an election or a pandemic, estimating the ROI and incoming traffic resulting from PPC campaigns is a complex operation.
Without constant keyword price variation and real-time reaction time monitoring and ad hoc fine-tuning of ads and keywords budget, the ROI per campaign plummets. This is very likely why only 9% of Google ads generate revenue.
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Ad Fraud: Aside from the immediate cost of ad fraud, there are collateral damages. When bots and click farms eat through your PPC budget, they generate low-quality traffic – high bounce rate, low returning visitor rate, and short-time visits – that negatively impacts your SEO score.
In short, an unsupervised PPC campaign might kill the benefit gained from organic SEO efforts. Yet, typically, SMBs lack both the budget to finance full-time PPC management and the time and knowledge to do it themselves or evaluate the effectiveness of agencies.
What is needed is a simple to use, easy-to-budget product that gives campaign creators full control on click costs, campaign budget allocation and timing, and provides easy to read analytics that calculate the ROI.
Referral campaign issues:
Referral campaigns, the most trusted promotional tool, and the one with the highest conversion rate, seem to provide that, though they often require complex initial integration that makes it hard to adapt to new marketing directions.
They also come with a few downsides.
By word of mouth:
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They work very well for enrolment, install, etc., but have a limited range of application
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Typically, generate a limited number of referrals per customer
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61% of customers who refer will make one referral
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34% of customers who refer will make 2–10 referrals
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5% of customers who refer will make 11+ referrals
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There is only one layer of referral. That means that when Customer A sends a referral to Friend A, Friend A has no incentive to forward it to Friend B.
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Typically, a referral reward locks the referrer in the issuer platform to benefit from the reward, be it a coupon, a deduction on fee, a gift card, and so on. The obvious immediate benefit is to increase the referrer’s loyalty, but the downside is that it limits the potential scope of the referrer, who might estimate that the available platform’s return for additional referrals is not attractive enough.
Through Influencers:
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Calculating the ROI implies a lot of guessing.
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Fake engagement can be as high as 16% of the total, according to Instascreener 2019 report.
What is needed is a flexible tool that makes it possible to incentivize everyone, monitors the genuineness of engagement and facilitates precise ROI calculation.
How do SmartLink solve the current problems?
On the PPC side, both budgeting issues stemming from keyword price fluctuations and ad-fraud related problems are solved.
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Keyword price fluctuation: A campaign creator on PPC Smartlink decides exactly what is the budget of the campaign and what is the reward per click. Yes, on Smartlink, the cost per click is the reward shared between referrers.
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Ad Fraud prevention: though 2key keeps the details of their fraud prevention techniques secret, their system leverages both Machine Learning and AI technology used by anti-ad fraud service providers, and the unique checks and filters specific to Ethereum Plasma and smart-contract defined spam limits.
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Ease of Use: No need to hire a specialist to set up a campaign or invest hours and hours to understand how it works. Creating a PPC SmartLink can take a little as three minutes. After sharing it with your community, you can always share it again to give it another boost or create a new Smartlink to promote a different piece of content.
On the Referral side, the referral system is maximized to new, previously unattainable heights.
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Application range: PPC SmartLink can be used to push any content at any time
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Integration: It takes less than five minutes with no technical knowledge required to create and launch a SmartLink campaign.
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Referral Layers: SmartLinks rely on 2key protocol to track and record any interaction with the Smartlink. The resulting Multi-Step Referral system is at the core of SmartLinks. Instead of rewarding the converter exclusively, any one part of a referral chain leading to a conversion is eligible for a share of the reward.
This is unique to 2key SmartLinks, and unleash the unlimited potential of Kevin Bacon Six Degrees of Separation. -
All referrers welcome: Web 2.0 referral programs, in their vast majority, are reserved to existing customers, effectively banning all potential referrers not yet registered as a user or a customer. SmartLinks are designed to be shared by anyone who finds their content valid and trusts human intelligence to share it forward to the member of their community or network interested in the content’s topic.
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Rewards in Cash: SmartLink rewards are distributed in 2KEY token, a tradable cryptocurrency, so the incentive to earn more is not limited by the perceived attractiveness of the campaign creator’s products. It is just money that can be spent, staked, swapped, exchanged, or hodled.
Aside from providing a new ad easy-to-use organic reach solution, 2key’s optimal use of decentralized technology effectively redistributes ad budget wealth to the people. Today, 84% of the global online marketing budget finds its way to Google and Facebook. Up to 26% of their clients advertising budget is then diverted to ad fraudsters, so the big winners are large corporations and downright criminals.
With 2key, fraudsters are sidelined and the advertising budget is getting straight to the wallet of the people who spread your word.
And the results are stellar!
Check it out in the following video from 2key CEO, Erez Ben-Kiki: