In the web3 arena, quests have become an essential tool for growth marketing, offering a compelling way to attract, engage, and retain users. Campaigns like Arbitrum Odyssey and Base’s Onchain Summer have demonstrated the clever ways that quests can be leveraged as a part of a larger marketing campaign.

But the fundamental three-word question is: did it work? Understanding the true success of a campaign goes beyond initial participation metrics. It requires assessing the long-term impact of acquired users, which can only be done with accurate campaign attribution and comprehensive data sets.

In this article, you will learn about Quest Protocol’s built-in attribution system that ensures every quest campaign is automatically tracked and analyzed onchain - no third-party tool required. We streamline the entire quest process, from creation, tracking and measurement so you can understand, without any doubt, how impactful your campaigns performed.

How our built-in attribution system works

Attribution is important because a user’s path to conversion is never linear. They will often engage with multiple channels and touchpoints before performing the converting action. Attribution tracking allows you to understand which specific channel and campaign the user came from so you can allocate more resources to it, or if the channel is a publisher, you can pay out the referral.

To track attribution on other quest platforms, you would have to integrate external web3 attribution services like Spindl or Safary. On Quest Protocol however, we built a sophisticated attribution system natively into the protocol so that all quests deployed are automatically tracked and attributed onchain.

Here’s a high-level overview of the flow:

1. Quest creators initiate a campaign on Quest Protocol and fund it. This funding is securely stored in a smart contract, the core of the campaign.

2. Users land on the quest webpage and connect their wallet to participate.

3. Users are redirected to the native project platform to complete the onchain action required for the quest.

4. The Quest Protocol indexer finds the transaction hash that matches the completed quest and verifies the action.

5. Upon successful verification, the smart contract unlocks the quest rewards. When users claim their rewards on Quest Protocol, the reward and claim fee is appropriately distributed to all contributing parties involved, including the quest participant, quest creator, and referrer.

6. Meanwhile, an event log is emitted and stored onchain as an immutable record. This data can be integrated with other datasets, like on Dune Analytics, for further in-depth analysis of the quest’s impact.

Getting into more details, there are a few key technical elements that enable our attribution tracking:

• Transaction-based Indexer: Unlike other platforms that may use simpler event-based indexing, Quest Protocol uses a transaction-based indexer that provides more in-depth transaction details. This gives a more granular view of quest actions to truly understand user behavior and trends.

• Transaction Hash: Serving as a unique identifier, the transaction hash is crucial for verifying that the specific onchain action matches with the completed quest.

• Smart Contract: Acting as a settlement layer, the smart contract holds and distributes the quest funds to relevant parties, ensuring transparency and security in the reward system.

By embedding these attribution capabilities into the protocol, we offer the most seamless and efficient process for quest campaign management and analysis. This frees projects from needing any additional external tracking or management tools. Along with this unlocks the ability to implement shared revenue onchain, which is a critical component to a fair and sustainable decentralized network.

The power of onchain revenue sharing

Revenue sharing is a powerful tool for incentivizing network participants to contribute to the growth and decentralization of a protocol. It’s a fundamental aspect of how web3 projects operate, thrive and survive.

As part of Quest Protocol’s built-in attribution system, we also enable seamless revenue sharing. This allows you to easily reward publishers for their referral in a very deterministic way.

On Quest Protocol, anyone can generate a referral link for a specific quest and distribute it on their platform or to their audience. When a referred user completes the quest and goes to claim their reward, the referrer and the quest creator will automatically be rewarded for their contribution. Learn more about how our Protocol Rewards works.

The key advantage here is the automation provided by Quest Protocol’s smart contract-based system. If you use other quest platforms, you would be required to use third-party tools to onboard and manage referrals. Quest Protocol is permissionless, meaning anyone can create and refer quests and be rewarded for it. Payout happens transparently onchain, ensuring fair compensation for all contributors without extra effort on the project side.

But the advanced system that we developed at Quest Protocol goes beyond just streamlining the attribution process. The true power it unlocks is the ability to conduct real-time data analysis. You can rapidly iterate and execute quest campaigns with unprecedented speed and efficiency so you can get to optimal results more quickly.

Analyzing long-term impact

Measuring the immediate success of a quest campaign is important for quick iterations, but it only offers a glimpse into the overall effectiveness of your marketing efforts. To truly gauge the success and impact of these campaigns, we have to dig deeper and instead ask the question, what was the impact?

Metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS) can be used to measure the immediate impact of the campaign, but the real value and success of a campaign often unfold over a longer period of time. To get to lower-funnel metrics like lifetime value (LTV) or retention rate, granular user-level data must be available.

If you recall, our transaction-based indexer and transaction hash are two key elements of Quest Protocol’s built-in attribution system. We index very detailed transaction data, but also log it onchain for anyone to verify and analyze.

The information can then be used with other data sets, like on Dune Analytics, to create a comprehensive report on both the immediate and long-term impact of the specific quest campaign.

Start tracking your quests

The power of Quest Protocol is that it models after web2 advertising networks and platforms that are vital to businesses. Whether we like to admit it or not, they are necessary to unlock scaled growth.

On Quest Protocol, you can target audiences, create campaigns, measure impact, refine and launch more campaigns. This creates a virtuous cycle that drives iterative and sustainable growth for projects.

To start, head to Quest Terminal to create your first quest campaign in minutes.

If you are a project that would like to integrate to Quest Protocol, get in touch with our team through this form and join our Discord community for support.

Follow Quest Protocol on Twitter: https://twitter.com/questprotocol_