With the blockchain being full of public, permissionless, data you would think it would be easy to track and understand who your NFT holders are, right…..right?! Given the right NFT tools, it can be.
My name is Skyler, CS for Holder, a web3 CRM. In this article, I’m going to break down and demystify NFT analytics and how you can start to track your holders today.
Why are NFT analytics important for web3 projects?
With NFTs cementing themselves in web3, we’re seeing a whole new category of communities that are tokenized. With over tens of thousands of NFT projects and DAOs, there is an increasing need to understand your community.
The best NFT projects today are active well past the initial hype generated from a launch. This utopia of a sustainable culture and ecosystem is delivered by engaging and creating community at the right moments.
According to the Harvard Business Review, NFT projects without a robust community almost always quickly collapse as all the token-holders lose interest. A good project’s NFT can quickly cascade to a near valueless state, which ends up frustrating communities.
To add to this, a survey consisting of 422 respondents across 223 different DAOs reported that one of the highest takeaways was fatigue. Many members only have enough time to only participate in a select few projects.
This is where analytics can come into play. Instead of guessing, NFT projects and DAO teams can take advantage of the blockchain’s native, key features. You can only improve what you can measure, which is why understanding the analytics around your project and owners is so important.
What kind of analytics can you pull from your NFT holders?
With the blockchain, you can see everything from
- Floor price of your project (42% of NFT holders are interested in this according to a report by Coingecko)
- NFT metadata
- Number of holders
- Other NFTs they own
- Transaction history
- Wallet age
- Wallet portfolio value
- And much more
I’m going to break down in three, very simplified, steps how to launch your own NFT project and start taking advantage of analytics today.
1. Create your web3 roadmap
The NFT meta as of late has been to launch with no roadmap, no team, and no information. While an established brand may be able to get away with this, brands looking to establish themselves need to chart where you want your project to go. Whether you make this public or keep it internal is dealer’s choice. But please, have a roadmap for how you’ll engage your NFT holders after the initial launch.
2. Launch your NFT project
This goes without saying, but in order to have a community, you’re going to need something to bring people together. Whether your project is the next big PFP project, a utility-based sports pass, or a community for marketers — you’ll need a product. But you already know this — since you created your roadmap. Learn more about our favorite tools for managing and launching an NFT project in an upcoming article!
3. Start using NFT analytics
Once your project has launched, you’re going to want to start delivering on your roadmap — and you’ll likely need some technology to help you track NFT analytics, understand your owners, and manage your community.
What are some of the best NFT analytics tools?
Here’s a couple of NFT analytics platforms to get you started.
Dune: Analytics platform powered by SQL
Dune lets anyone execute custom SQL queries on the blockchain and put them into visual, graphical interfaces that give you excellent NFT analytics and insights into your community, such as the amount of owners, daily volume, floor price, and much more. You can then compile these queries into powerful NFT analytics dashboards.
While Dune is a research tool and starting point for many NFT projects, you’ll need to know SQL to get super detailed. They have a strong community, though, and many publically available dashboards that require no code – just your contract address!
Keen to try it out for yourself? Try out one of our favorite public dashboards, here, by John Sweeney.
Nansen: Real-time crypto and NFT insights
Nansen provides a real-time data analytics platform that provides insights into the market. They deliver insightful information on prolific traders, dubbed Smart Money, that gives both holders and creators the ability to track which NFTs are being traded and purchased by the best. This is helpful for understanding what your projects’ highly active members might be participating in, giving you an edge on marketing strategy.
In addition to their Smart Money features, they’re great if you’re interested in NFT rarity rankings, market insights, and wallet tags based on activity. Nansen’s tools, though, are mostly used by individual traders and not businesses.
Holder: All-in-one web3 CRM and audience insights platform
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our own platform here. Holder provides NFT creators and project owners a powerful customer relationship management platform and the tools they need to deliver the right message, at the right time. Holder combines analytics and audience insights with marketing tools to drive engagement and deeper relationships with owners.
A few things that are possible:
- Build dynamic member lists using advanced filters and segmentation based on both engagement and wallet data
- Keep member information organized by taking notes, tagging, and seeing member activity in a web3 “CRM” Use built-in messaging functionality to send emails, Discord messages, etc. to your community members
- Send wallet messages directly to your NFT holders.
- Collect other owner information through Holder’s wallet authentication and web3 form builder.
- And more!
You can get started for free now!
Honorable Mention: DIY
There are a handful of ways to try and DIY an NFT analytics tool. As the premier blockchain explorer, Etherscan, can also give you insights into everything from wallets, smart contracts, blockchain transaction history, and more. They give you the ability to download transaction history into a CSV, which you could then manually clean and dump into your own dashboards in Google Sheets. This is a great way to get started before using a more robust platform.
Final thoughts
Alright, this is getting longer than my marketing team will let me make it, so let's wrap this up.
Managing an NFT community, tracking NFT holders, and mining powerful NFT analytics doesn’t have to be hard. In fact, with the right analytics tools, it can be done very simply and without a lot of capital. It just takes a little understanding of how to do so.
Want to learn more? Check out Holder to see if a web3 CRM is the right fit for your NFT project.
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