Affiliate Case Study: 40% ROI with localised dating offer using Video Slider
Experienced affiliate marketing professional Filipe Dominguez shares a campaign case study on how he tested the Video Slider ad format for a localised dating offer.
Campaign period: 28 May – 15 June 2020 (19 days)
Offer: Localised dating website
Ad Network: ExoClick
Ad format: Video Slider
GEO: Spain
Investment: $262.10
Total income: $369
Net profit: $107.01
Conversions: 123
ROI: 40.82%
Introduction
I had been using the Instant Message format on ExoClick for a while now to convert various dating offers. But I was seeing a drop in conversions in Spain, so my ExoClick account manager recommended that I test the Video Slider format, which is similar to the IM, sliding in from the bottom right of the webpage. I had tested dating offers with video ads before, using pre-roll in-stream and that had worked quite well, so I already had the content for the ads. So here are the results of my first test using the video slider for dating.
Creative
As Spain was still gradually coming out of lockdown, I concentrated more on the online flirting angle as physically meeting was still difficult, so I chose a simple 22 second video ad creative that showed some different dating profiles, images of a guy and a girl video chatting on a laptop and mobile with 4 texts (translated into Spanish):
Feeling lonely?
Join in the fun!
Everybody is flirting online
Sign up now!
All clicks went through to a pre lander which contained testimonials from male and female users on how the dating site had entertained them during lockdown, CTA was a ‘Join in the fun!’ button that led to a sign up page.
Targeting & campaign set up
When launching campaigns I always use smart CPM because it allows me to win bids at the best possible price. I set the maximum I was willing to pay at 0.02 cents for this campaign.
I targeted Spain for both desktop & mobile video slider traffic, no other targeting. I used the Bidder to optimise this test because once I set up the Bidder I could leave the campaign running while it automatically blocked ad zones that were not performing for me.
I used the following settings on the Bidder:
I chose a Target CPA of $2.50 because the payout is $3 so I wanted to generate at least 0.50 cents profit. Then I set $3.50 as a maximum spend per zone, even though the recommended max test budget should be around 3xtimes the payout (9$) I didn’t want to take a big risk, so I added a little extra budget with $3.50. I didn’t add any further rules, or any further targeting optimisation, I wanted to just let the test run and see what happened with the video slider format.
Results
Goal 1 was set as pre lander page visitors which totalled 79,003, Goal 2 was people who clicked through to the sign up page totalling 1,856 and Goal 3 were my sign ups which generated 123. My cost per lead was $2.13 giving me 0.87 cents profit per lead generated.
With the Video Slider I was getting an average 1% CTR. When I was using Instant Message I was getting around 0.41% CTR, so the video slider worked better for this test campaign and I was happy to see I was getting a 44.62% view ratio for the video ad.
Conclusion
By adapting my campaign to market forces (lockdown) and repurposing existing video content I think the strategy definitely worked. As I stated, this campaign was only a test to see if i could convert dating offers with the video slider format and i was pleased with the results. Now I will test in other GEOs and scale up. As everyone is now coming out of lockdown I will change my angle, but I definitely recommend trying video slider for dating offers.
Editors note: ExoClick’s business inteligence department compared CTRs for Instant Message versus Video Slider globally across a range of verticals, with Slider generating significantly higher CTRs:
For further reading check out our blog post: 3 reasons why you should be using Video Advertising
