Glossary

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Glossary: Onchain Attribution

Onchain attribution is the process of identifying and crediting the specific source, campaign, referrer, or user action that led to a measurable on-chain outcome such as a wallet activation, transaction, or protocol interaction.

What is Onchain Attribution?

Onchain Attribution Explained

Imagine you run a campaign across three different channels and suddenly your protocol gets a wave of new wallets connecting.

Which channel sent them?

Off-chain analytics can tell you where website traffic came from. But once a user connects their wallet and starts transacting, traditional tools lose the trail.

Onchain attribution picks it up from there.

It connects the dots between where a user came from and what they actually did on the blockchain, giving teams a complete picture of what is driving real results.

What Onchain Attribution Means For

Audience	Use Case
Growth and marketing teams in Web3	Attribute wallet activations and on-chain conversions to specific campaigns, referrers, or channels to measure true marketing ROI
Protocol founders and product teams	Understand which acquisition sources bring users who actually transact, not just users who visit and leave without connecting a wallet
Analysts and data teams	Build attribution models that combine off-chain traffic data with on-chain wallet behavior to create a complete view of the user acquisition journey

Examples

A protocol tags referral links with unique identifiers and maps each new wallet connection back to the specific campaign or community that generated it.
A growth team uses onchain attribution to discover that users acquired through a Discord partnership have a transaction completion rate three times higher than users from paid social ads.
An analyst builds an attribution model combining UTM data with on-chain wallet activity to measure the full journey from first click to first transaction for each acquisition channel.
A token project uses onchain attribution to identify which community ambassadors are driving the highest quality wallet activations and increases their rewards accordingly.

FAQs

Why is attribution harder in Web3 than in Web2?

Web2 attribution relies on cookies and sessions. Web3 users interact through wallets, which are pseudonymous and not tied to an identity, making it harder to connect off-chain behavior to on-chain actions.

What is the difference between onchain attribution and UTM tracking?

UTM tracking captures where traffic came from off-chain. Onchain attribution extends that by linking the traffic source to actual on-chain actions like wallet connections and transactions.

Can onchain attribution work without cookies?

Yes. Onchain attribution uses wallet addresses and on-chain data as identifiers rather than cookies, making it more durable as third-party cookies are phased out across the web.

What data is needed for onchain attribution?

A combination of off-chain traffic data such as UTM parameters and referrer information, plus on-chain wallet activity, transaction history, and smart contract interaction logs.

What tools support onchain attribution?

Platforms like Formo are built specifically for onchain attribution, combining web analytics with on-chain wallet data to give Web3 teams a complete view of their acquisition and conversion performance.

Related Terms

A/B Testing

An experiment that compares two versions of a page, feature, or campaign to see which performs better.

Account Abstraction

Account abstraction is an approach that turns blockchain accounts into programmable smart contract wallets, enabling features like gasless transactions, social recovery, session keys, and paying fees in any token.

Activation Rate

Activation rate is the percentage of new users or wallets that complete a key activation milestone, such as a first transaction, out of all users who signed up or connected within a given period.