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The biggest challenges in web3
User acquisition and product analytics remain among the biggest challenges in crypto.
Most Web3 activity is pseudonymous, with users interacting through crypto wallets rather than email or IRL identifiers. Their user journey spans fragmented on-chain and off-chain platforms. Key conversion events, such as swapping on a DEX or purchasing on an NFT marketplace, happen onchain outside the traditional web.
Traditional analytics tools like Mixpanel and Google Analytics cannot see onchain data, so you miss out on crucial information. Today's top engagement and retention tools ignore the wealth of data available onchain. For example, marketing solutions like Hubspot do not take into account on-chain actions and events, while product analytics systems like Mixpanel do not natively handle blockchain data. Data about user acquisition, drop-off, and retention from a large chunk of the web3 user's journey is missing.
Answering even simple queries is hard in Web3:
Where do my users come from?
Which channels/campaigns are driving the most revenue? What's the ROI?
Who are my top users, and how can I retain them?
What were the biggest retention factors, and at which step of the funnel did most users drop off?
What is my LTV : CAC ratio, and how can I increase it?
Uncovering your true growth and retention drivers and acquisition channels has been a big challenge in Web3. The vast percentage of onchain activity is disconnected from Web2 and hard to decipher. A side-effect of this problem is web3's unhealthy obsession with vanity metrics, which is much easier to get (and easy to fake.)
Data is the lifeblood of any business. It helps you understand your customers, make data-driven decisions, and drive growth. Without accurate data and attribution, you are lost in a dark forest.
High barriers for onchain attribution and profiling
Web3 projects struggle to get the data they need to make impactful decisions. Blockchains are optimized for writes, and reading data efficiently and reliably at scale is challenging. Data is scattered across separate blockchains and data silos. It takes serious engineering work to collect all this data, much less analyze it. Collecting and aggregating data from multiple blockchains and offchain sources requires deep expertise and complex tools (such as Databricks, Apache Spark, Mixpanel, and Dune.)
To do it right, you need extensive SQL and data engineering expertise to collect, process, and analyze data. You'd need a dedicated team of data engineers and analysts to create data pipelines and dashboards for your project. As a result, product teams spend valuable resources on infrastructure and integrations instead of shipping user-facing features.
Building in-house data pipelines and analytics infrastructure is beyond the means of small, scrappy teams. Not every team can allocate resources away from building their core product. As a result, analytics often falls by the wayside and remains in the backlog forever. The absence of tools has made measuring the impact of growth initiatives and targeting users unnecessarily difficult. Teams across web3 are struggling to understand onchain user behaviour.
Onchain data is an untapped wealth of insights
Data on blockchains provides unparalleled accessibility and insight into user behaviour. Onchain, you can observe any onchain users’ holdings and past activity, even when they don’t interact directly with your product. In Web2, this is unheard of. Onchain data is a public and permissionless data goldmine. We need only a better tool to access it.
In web2, third-party data, cookies, and fingerprinting are foundational building blocks of cohort segmentation. They perform two core functions: attribution and identity.
Attribution refers to granular event analytics around who, how, and when users interact with your apps and websites (funnels, UTM, referral headers).
Identity refers to the sum of user activity used to construct a profile for targeting (country, device, onchain activity).
Web2 attribution and identity resolution can be applied to construct rich profiles and user segments that can be targeted more effectively. Minting, staking, swapping, and voting are high-intent actions that signal meaningful interest in a topic. Wallet addresses, tokens, attestations, and onchain user activity offer a new, meaningful set of attributes that can be used to construct customer profiles. Blockchain data opens up new doors for you to identify and target real, active users.
Identity and attribution are key ingredients for growth, and linking crypto-native web3 data (wallets, tokens, and transactions) with web2 data (dapp and browser interactions) unlocks a clear path for growth and retention.
Formo makes it easy to digest web3 data
Formo is a web3 data platform that helps you understand your users and how they engage with your app so you can build a better product.
Formo makes it easy to digest web3 data, streamlining data collection, processing, and analysis for data-driven product teams. Focus on building amazing web3 experiences. Leave the data engineering and analytics to us.
Key Features
Here’s a quick overview of what Formo can do: product analytics, wallet intelligence, and forms.
Say hello to Web3-native Product Analytics:
Track web3 growth metrics: Track visitor counts, DAU, WAU, MAU, transactions, retention, and churn. Measure engagement and growth over time.
Real-time activity feed: See what users are doing in real-time. Uncover hidden drop-off points and retention drivers.
Onchain Attribution: Identify the top channels and growth initiatives that drive onchain activity. Understand where users come from.
Privacy-friendly: No cookies, no personal data. Just clear, privacy-friendly insights limited to a single device, a single website, and a single day. Formo helps your dapp align with GDPR standards and avoid collecting unnecessary data.
Lightweight script: Formo's tracking script ensures your site remains fast and efficient.
Wallet intelligence activates your high-intent users and whales:
Wallet profiles: Turn anonymous wallets into high-value users with unified onchain and offchain data. Track usage of specific, high-value wallets on your dapp.
Wallet reputation scoring: Use wallet labels, onchain attestations, and proof-of-personhood to segment and rank your users.
Wallet holdings and activity: View your users’ token holdings and top apps. Uncover users using similar apps.
Token Gated Forms helps you effortlessly launch waitlists, forms, and surveys:
Verified socials: Verify Twitter accounts, Discord usernames, Farcaster, and more.
Token gating: Capture wallet data, token balances, attestations, and other onchain signals.
Zapier integration: Connect Formo with thousands of other apps to get things done faster.
Formo handles the data so you can focus on building
Give yourself and your team data superpowers. Spend less time building analytics and more time building products. Leave the complex data engineering to Formo. Stop choosing between building analytics and user-facing features.
You can get:
Resilient Infrastructure: Zero-maintenance, high-reliability data pipelines built on a modern data engineering stack. Formo uses industry-leading technologies such as Clickhouse and data streaming.
Universal Data Access: Capture web2 and web3 data as standardized event schemas with the Formo SDK. Easily track attribution from initial engagement offchain to transactions onchain.
No-code Analytics: Formo eliminates the need for a dedicated data team of SQL wizards to create dashboards and data pipelines.
Supercharge your growth with data and build products people want.
Next steps
Now that you understand the basics, it’s time to supercharge your team with data.
Create a workspace
First, sign in to app.formo.so to create your workspace.
Install Formo
With your workspace set up, install Formo on your dapp. The Formo SDK supports Browser, React, and Next.js installations.
Success!
Start making data-driven decisions with actionable insights about your users and how they use your dapp.
Light up the dark forest with Formo. Book a demo or learn more.
