With its new PPC SmartLink product, 2key gives you the ability to trace, INCENTIVIZE and reward any link sharing, adding the power of word-of-mouth to PPC campaigns and removing the budgetary uncertainty of keyword bidding wars.
PPC (Pay per Click) campaigns are great to generate traffic, but they suffer from two severe downsides:
- They are difficult to budget accurately due to the keyword bidding process they are built upon. As the total volume of searches is plateauing, competition for keywords is likely to result in a hike in price.
- They require constant monitoring and fine-tuning. Without close supervision and management, 97% of Google Ads campaign fail.
- Ad fraud is eating up to 25% of brands’ budgets according to Traffic Guard.
This might be partly why advocacy, whether through influencer marketing or refer-a-friend campaigns, is gaining market shares. Yet, each of these options comes with their own issues.
Influencer Marketing:
- Calculating the ROI implies a lot of guessing.
- Fake engagement can be as high as 16% of the total, according to Instascreener 2019 report.
Refer-a-Friend Campaign:
- Work great for enrolment goals, but have a limited range of application
- Typically, generate a limited number of referrals per customer
- 61% of customers will make 1 referral
- 34% of customers will make 2–10 referrals
- 5% of customers will make 11+ referrals
And even those 5% of customers who make over 11 referrals only reach out to their primary circle, with no incentive to spread the message further.
Fully organic word-of-mouth referrals are, of course, the best, with a four to five times higher conversion rate and a drastically lifetime value than other customer acquisition sources, but unfortunately, without incentive, your potential ambassadors only share your content if and when they are in the mood.
If only there was a way to incentivize your primary circle to share your content and to entice their contacts to share it further and so on.
Even better, if only it was easy to implement, without having to conceive a new campaign each time.
That is exactly what PPC SmartLinks do!
PPC SmartLinks open the door to finally draw the benefits of the law of six degrees of separation to access the potential of reaching everyone on Earth through incentivized referrals.
With PPC SmartLink, you get direct access to the power of human social intelligence, social mining, and advocacy, AND you keep overarching control over the click price. Even better, this new way of reaching eyeballs consolidates your existing audience as you reward them for becoming your ambassador.
2Key PPC Smartlink launching on Mainnet is scheduled for May 15th. You can already practice on 2key testnet, just to get the feel of it, using Ropsten Tokens that have no value.
Or you could try “No Rewards” campaigns to trace your link distribution and see how your content spreads across your community and the communities of our community members and so on. Of course, No Reward campaigns carry no incentive, so the spread is less viral.
What Are PPC SmartLinks?
PPC SmartLinks are regular links embedded with blockchain technology that perform several tasks. The results are links that contain incentives for people to share them.
From a technical perspective, when you turn a regular HTTP link into a PPC SmartLinks, the 2key protocol tracks and records every interaction with the SmartLink. The smart contract then rewards each sharer active in the referral chain that led to a conversion.
Practically, it means that every time your SmartLink is previewed, viewed or shared forward, that activity is recorded and displayed on your dashboard.
When your link is clicked, the allocated click budget is distributed to every person in the referral chain leading to that click. That is a powerful incentive!
Not only are referrers earning a crypto reward for their activity, but they are also sharing in the rewards of all the other referrers in the chain.
Even better, 2key reputation scoring ensures against indiscriminate sharing and spamming. There even is a feedback feature that lets any user give feedback about the content or the sharer.
How do SmartLinks work?
SmartLinks are disconcertingly simple to use.
Let’s imagine that you want to promote a specific page content. For this example, we will use the 2key new SmartSession announcement blogpost.
After signing in your 2key account, create a page. This is necessary because personal wallets and page wallets need to be separate, which avoids mixing between personal and business expenses.
From your page, you can create a PPC SmartLink campaign in a few clicks.
- Start your campaign.
You have two different ways of creating a campaign. Either use an existing link and turn it into a SmartLink with a single click or create entirely new content.
If you are targeting different communication channels or mixed audiences, creating separate campaigns with different titles and thumbnail images maximizes the conversion rate.
For example, one for each email segment, one for Facebook and Twitter, and one for LinkedIn.
As your initial audience is the one that will propagate your link, it is worth investing the extra time to maximize the initial effect.
1. Set up your campaign budget.
One of the attractions of the 2key SmartLink system is that you keep full control of your budget. No more keyword bidding sudden price increase that sees your inbound traffic plummet unexpectedly!
You set up the price per click, and it is fixed and immutable regardless of external factors.
Instead of financing mega-corporations that use your budget to increase data point collection about your visitors, you reward the individuals who shared your link, creating a new economic model that redistributes the immense Internet wealth.
2. Select the reward split model.
Each time your link is clicked, each person in the referral chain receives a fraction of the click’s budget. This is called the Referral Reward.
There are three ways to split the reward between referrers. As the campaign creator, you select the reward split method best suited for your audience.
2key’s AI scores referrers’ reputation, penalizing spammers, and rewarding high performing referrers with 2KEY tokens reserved for that purpose, the quality of the referral increases with time.
One of the best ways to establish what works best is to run A/B testing with each method and analyze which one brings the highest conversion.
3. Seed your campaign by sharing it with your core audience
Once your campaign is deployed on Ethereum blockchain, all you have to do is to give it the initial push by sharing it with your existing audience and let them propagate your message with their own circles and beyond.
You can easily do this from your campaign dashboard. You can edit the text that will show in social media platforms above the link’s thumbnail that shows the title and image you defined earlier.
From that point on, your campaign is entirely self-managed, and all you have to do is sit back, relax, and watch the referral tree grow as your seed audience shares it forward.
When setting up the campaign, there are a lot of additional options to target specific audiences by location, gender, age, etc. These are all very easy to understand, and this post is just meant to give a general overview of the system.
Now that you saw how easy it is to set up a campaign, time to take a peek at how it looks from the referrer’s side.
From the referrer’s perspective
When referrers share your SmartLink, this is what they are sharing:
The recipient can decide whether to open the link to access the content or just share it with his circle and potentially earn compensation for his sharing activity.
Keeping in mind that everyone is connected by six degrees of separation or less, with PPC SmartLinks, you have the potential to reach everyone and anyone! Without any complex algorithm, just with good old-fashioned human intelligence and social knowledge, with one to one contact from known sources.
Once the campaign ends, all the referral rewards are distributed in a batch tx to all the qualified referrers' wallets registered on the 2key Network.
Grow your organic reach & join the decentralized revolution.
Create your first SmartLink here --> 2key.io .
