How crypto exchanges bypass Ad bans of Google, Facebook, and Twitter
Do you remember that you showed a pie of fund distribution to you investors with up to 40% of your budget spending on marketing? It’s time to spend it and acquire right users. But paid growth channels are “bit” reduced by censored mainstream Ad platforms like Google AdWords, Facebook Business, and Twitter. How will it change your marketing strategy?
Let’s look at the leading crypto exchanges and understand key figures. TOP-10 crypto exchanges (sorry for my personal TOP-11) attracted from 1,85mln Bibox users up to 62 mln Binance users in May 2018. So, If you have plans to start successful crypto exchange today you target is 20 mln monthly users at least.
How do you think they have acquired their millions of users? Who of them implements unique marketing strategy and think different? Let’s scan their marketing channels distribution (thanks Similar Web). Number one is direct traffic and, oops, it looks enormous big. All our TOP exchanges have from 71% to 82% of direct traffic.
Usually, it indicates:
- huge brand awareness
- small amount of overall traffic with a dominance of one organic channel
- raw, initial level of marketing strategy without diversity of channels
- test direct traffic of developers team and early adopters of brand
But here is neither huge brand awareness nor initial stage of the product (keep in mind millions of users). Users type the domain name in the browsers or click bookmarks directly from brain and memory.
Even second important channel for this group of exchanges — search channels show that users know brands and search brand itself and brand queries. They know the brand from somewhere else.
Coinbase is a rare example of diversified search approach among the group, they even use paid search (I suppose, to protect their brand from parasitizing competitors ads).
Other exchanges usually also get brand organic search traffic but run down paid search (let’s assume, it doesn’t pay any significant role).
And another example:
Next group of traffic gives some tips about how they acquire clients. All answers about how they contact users are in referral and social traffic. And direct answer about what drives the marketing of crypto exchanges are referral Coinmarketcap (plus some important regional crypto sites, media, and crypto ad networks) and social Youtube (plus Twitter or Facebook).
Coinmarketcap is usually #1 of referral traffic of all exchanges in the group. It offers at least 6 Ads formats starting from $10K advertising budget.
And it looks true, that huge Coinmarketcap traffic may drive many other leading exchanges — it had 144 million visits in May.
One more angle we should look at Coinmarketcap is the regional structure of its audience. It looks quite relevant to all crypto audience distribution with main players. And this listing affects the regional structure of our exchanges.
Youtube is a leading social platform among crypto exchanges now. It leads about a half of social traffic directly, boosts brand awareness and establishes trust between the brand of the exchange and viewers of the video.
As for other channels, it seems that Bittrex team knows how to communicate with the loyal audience, they attract 6,6% of traffic by email marketing channels. You may subscribe to their newsletter to benchmark this part of their strategy.
Traditional display ads now play the minor role among exchanges and usually indicate less than 0,1% of traffic in the group.
My next articles will highlight several topics:
- Who drives crypto exchanges in Youtube: channels, influencers or agencies
- Beyond Coinmarketcap: what is inside referral traffic of crypto exchanges — ad networks, media, trash
- How to reach the right regional audience for crypto exchange
- Blockchain Ad networks for marketing of crypto exchanges
Read also a crypto marketing article Semantic core of crypto ATM services: search marketing guideline
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