Dating CPA Case Study: 368% ROI 💖 With Push Notification Traffic

Want to see how I’ve achieved a 368% ROI (return on investment) with dating CPA offers using push notification traffic?

Great… I’m going to show you exactly how I’ve achieved that in this dating CPA case study.

Now before we go any further, I have to tell you a little dark secret:

I’ve done this dating CPA experiment about 2 years ago, but I’m publishing it now, because well… I was a dumbass and didn’t give enough attention to this blog until now (2021).

Anyway, I hope you get something out of this that might help you out, especially if you’re promoting CPA offers and want to get some extra insight.

Oh, and you’re going to be able to download the landing page that I have used… for FREE of course 😉 but that’s later down this article, so read the case study and then steal it, I mean… download it.

Deal?

Alright, let’s get started.

Dating CPA case study – The Details

Let’s go over some of the important details about this dating CPA case study, you’re going to see exactly what networks I’ve used, CPA offer, CPA network, traffic source, landing page, and more.

GEO Location

Okay, so I wanted to try something different, and I decided to test African countries, and so I’ve pretty much targeted the whole continent (at first).

In general, I wouldn’t recommend you to create CPA campaigns targeting multiple countries at the same time, but this one time I said screw it, let’s see what happens.

CPA Network

I went with LosPollos as the CPA network for this campaign, as I’ve used them in the past and I liked their offers and they always paid on time.

LosPollos is a great CPA network and I would recommend it to anyone.

No, I’m not paid or sponsored or an affiliate of theirs, I just honestly think they are good people with amazing exclusive offers and it’s probably one of the better networks around.

Dating CPA offer

LosPollos doesn’t have traditional CPA offers, they have smartlinks on different categories such as:

• Dating
• Mainstream
• Crypto
• Casual Dating
• Gay Dating
• Gambling
• Male Enhancement
• Cams
• Adult Games

A smartlink is basically a unique affiliate link that you can then use to promote CPA offers in a category (like dating), when someone clicks on your link they will be shown a random CPA offer (from that category).

The CPA offer shown will be selected automatically by the LosPollos algorithm which figures out on the fly what is a good offer to show to that user based on a number of things such as Device, location, internet connection type, etc.

Using a smartlink is beneficial when you want to test campaigns in new GEOs where you don’t find too many regular CPA offers available, so for this CPA dating campaign I needed a smartlink since I was targeting a bunch of countries at the same time.

Ad Network

Naturally, I’m a fan of cheap traffic, which converts well, so I went with PropellerAds this time.

I like PropellerAds because they have good converting traffic, have a fast approval time (usually it takes a couple of minutes to get your creatives approved), and they have cheap traffic of course.

Traffic Type

PropellerAds has 3 main traffic types:

• Push notification traffic – users get notifications on their phone/laptop.
• Interstitial – a type of banner that is shown over the content
• Popunder (OnClick) – your regular pop ads (popunder gets shown on click).

Even though I like all of these types of traffic, and they all convert well, for this dating CPA campaign I went with push notification traffic, as I had a feeling would convert much better in these GEOs.

I chose CPM (cost per 1000 ad views) traffic instead of CPC, as I figured out that since there was a ton of traffic available in Africa on PropellerAds, and not that many people were targeting those countries, CPM would have brought me a much lower cost per acquisition if I get a decent CTR (click-through rate).

Usually, you start with CPC (cost per click) campaigns and then go CPM when you know you have winner ads with high CTRs, but apparently, on PropellerAds their CPC and CPM zones are not really the same, so I went CPM first this time around as I wanted to target more people.

Revenue

Alright time to get into the juicy stuff, now bear in mind that I had no idea what would happen because it was the first time when I have targeted these countries.

The total revenue for this dating CPA campaign was: $518.66

Yes, it’s not an insane amount of money, but, it only took me 10 minutes to set everything up, and I only let the campaigns run just for a few days.

Usually, when I find winner campaigns like this one I stick with them for a longer time and try to scale things up, but after a few days the conversions started to fizzle out and I didn’t bother to optimize them more.

Plus, I earn a lot more by doing arbitrage (while building assets in the process), and it takes less time compared to promoting CPA offers.

I don’t like that for some CPA categories like this dating one, I can’t build an email list properly, because it will drastically hurt the conversions.

I’m sure that if I wasn’t such a fan of AdSense arbitrage… I would have continued optimizing this CPA campaign more aggressively with new landing pages and ads every day.

But… I’m lazy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and I have decided it wasn’t worth it.

Traffic Cost

Alright, so by now I’m sure that you’re anxious to know how much I paid for traffic in order to get that $518.66 in revenue.

$110.74 – Yes, that’s it. A little over $100, and have made $500+ in revenue. Awesome stuff right?

So many people want to learn how to make money online and most of the time their only goal is to turn $100 into $200, well, turning $100 (ok $110.74), into $518, seems like a pretty good deal.

Wouldn’t you agree?

Net Profit

Anyway, the net profit was $407.92 (after taking away $110.74 from the $518.66 since I had to pay for traffic).

ROI

Sure the revenue number is not an astronomical amount, but the 368% ROI is pretty nice.

That was only possible thanks to the dirt cheap traffic that I got from PropellerAds, especially since I was bidding on a CPM model with a $0.01 starting bid.

Plus of course, most of the payouts for these CPA dating offers were $35. Why that high? Because the users had to pull out their credit card 😉

But from some countries I’ve also had conversions as low as $0.015 (as you would soon get to see) so it all balances out in the end lol.

Dating CPA – Campaign Setup

Now I’m going to show you the campaign settings that I have used inside PropellerAds and how I’ve created the actual CPA campaigns for this test.

First, I went for a large volume of traffic with a regular CPM campaign targeting pretty much every country in Africa.

After that, I’ve created variations of the same campaign with different ad sets, and only changed the creatives and ad text.

When I ran those campaigns targeting all the countries I have only gotten good results out of a few of them, so then I’ve decided to separate them and create individual campaigns using the same dating CPA smartlink.

Dating CPA Step #1: Choosing Traffic Type

The first step of the campaign starts out with choosing the traffic type, in this case, I went with push notification traffic with a CPM pricing model (paying for every 1,000 views).

After that I’ve come up with a campaign name: Date – Africa – CPM #1 (how original I know).

When I have originally run these dating CPA offers, there was no In-page push option, so I’ve used the classic push notification model.

I have capped my impressions to 1 time per 24 hours, this means that I wanted 1 unique person to just see the ad one time in 24 hours, if you increase that to 3 times in 24 hours, you might get better conversions since one user will see your ad more times and decide to finally click on it.

This time though, since there was a ton of traffic available, I went with a more conservative approach of 1 view per 1 unique person, every 24 hours.

Dating CPA Step #2: Traffic & User Options

Here I went with EVERYTHING that was available, so I have checked every box, I wanted all the traffic as fast as possible, from both PropellerAds network and their partners (meaning other ad platforms).

The user activity is pretty important, as you can see there are 3 levels:

• High – These users will click on ads more so you get higher CTR (low volume)
• Medium – Average volume and activity levels.
• Low – Users that don’t click on ads too much but cheap and high volume.

The high users are the most expensive and also have the lowest amount of traffic available. I’ve tried them a bit but meh, it’s not for me.

So I have selected ALL of them since I wanted to target the most amount of people in a short time.

Dating CPA Step #3: Countries & Bids

Here you can see that I went batshit crazy and have targeted pretty much the whole continent of Africa.

Sure I could have gone with just a few countries but, sometimes I like to surprise myself lol.

Anyway, I went with a $0.01 CPM bid, which again, pretty insane how cheap that gets. Imagine clicks that are lower than $0.001 if you have a good CTR on your ads.

Dating CPA Step #4: Traffic Volume

This traffic volume is the one that I get right now (April 2021) for the same campaign settings inside PropellerAds.

Keep in mind that I have run this dating CPA offer about 2 years ago, so the traffic available at that time might have been a little different.

Still, I remember a huge amount of available traffic, just like you see in the screenshot above, so yeah pretty similar.

If you want to target more people, you simply increase your CPM or CPC bid.

Dating CPA Step #5: Budget & Targeting

Here you can choose your advertising budget, how much you want your daily campaign to spend, and the total budget for the overall lifetime of the campaign.

I always go with $50-$100 per day (per campaign) and then the total budget is double that amount, just in case the campaign goes over the daily limit and I don’t like the results too much, it can stop automatically without losing too much money.

If the campaign is doing great, obviously you increase the total campaign budget, so that you can spend more per day/month.

But since I knew that I would be launching variations of the same CPA campaign but with other ad creatives and ad sets, I left it at $100 for every one of them, until I was able to see which one performs best to increase their budget.

There’s also more advanced targeting to be done here, such as choosing the device type (smartphone, desktop, tablet), browser, language, connection type, and zone inclusion and exclusion.

As you can see I have left it on default without selecting anything, in order to gather a lot of data at first, and then I can do changes later when launching individual campaigns.

Dating CPA Step #6: Audience Retargeting

This option wasn’t available back then, so assume that the settings were “Don not collect”.

And finally…

Dating CPA Step #7: Ad Creative

Here you could see my ad title, description, and both the icon and image that I have used.

Keep in mind this is just one ad creative from dozens more, I’m not going to show you the rest but imagine that they are more… SPICY 😉

The key takeaways for this dating CPA ad creative:

• Ad title: I went with a more direct approach, trying to spark a direct conversation with the user.
• Description: I had nothing else in my mind at that time so I went with “I’m bored…”
• Icon: This one I feel is pretty important, especially when using the direct conversation method.
• Image: This one is a basic image and literally the only one that’s not showing too many things…but most of them were way SPICIER than this one.

The “show buttons” option wasn’t available, assume that it was disabled.

Dating CPA – CPM Campaigns (ALL GEOs)

As you can see, the numbers for the campaigns where I have targeted almost ALL countries in Africa were pretty nuts:

• Ad Impressions – 4,258,988
• Number of Clicks – 43,081
• Average CTR – 1,01%
• CPM Rate – $0.01-$0.120 (I paid $0.12 CPM for a campaign with high user activity).
• Total Cost – $56.927 for the CPM campaigns targeting ALL locations.
• Avg. CPC – $0.001 with a CPM as low as $0.01, it’s no wonder that my CPC was $0.001 (and lower for some campaigns).

The only issue here at least for me is the 1% CTR, sure that’s not that bad, but it’s still pretty average.

However, you have to keep in mind that you can’t get a high CTR on CPM ads when you’re targeting 20+ countries in the same campaign.

Not only that but the ads that I have made were in English, and since not all the people in Africa have English as their native language, (some have French) but in general most of them have their own native language with a ton of dialects, the CTR couldn’t really get higher.

Dating CPA – Individual Campaigns

Now after that I have created individual campaigns, targeting only 3 countries:

• Nigeria
• Namibia
• Liberia

With a total cost spread between of them of $53.82

So $53.82 (individual campaigns) + $56.92 (ALL countries) = $110.74 (total cost for all the campaigns in this dating CPA case study).

Dating CPA – The Landing Page

Stephen, but what about the landing page?

Yeah, I hear you… here it is:

Pretty simple and boring? Maybe.

Did it bring results? HECK Yea.

I wanted to make a more Tinder-inspired landing for this one, so this is what I’ve come up with.

I got anywhere between 20% to 50% CTR with this one, depending on the country from where the traffic came.

Some countries and ads would have a higher landing page CTR than others.

Dating CPA – Revenue

Alright, let’s see what countries brought in the most conversions in LosPollos:

So, here’s the revenue breakdown:

• Nigeria > 11 Conversions = $234.64
• Liberia > 6 Conversions = $175.01
• Namibia > 3 Conversions = $105
• South Africa > 1 Conversion = $1.40
• Kenya > 4 Conversions = $1.20
• Tunisia > 6 Conversions = $0.96
• Zimbabwe > 14 Conversions = $0.35
• Angola > 1 Conversion = $0.07
• Senegal > 2 Conversions = $0.03

TOTAL Revenue = $518.66

Obviously, I didn’t include the countries that received a ton of traffic but made no conversions. There are a lot of rows that I haven’t included because it would have been pointless.

Yes, getting 2 conversions totaling $0.03 ($0.015 per conversion) is indeed funny to see.

As you can see, there is a huge pay gap between these countries with very huge differences in CPA rates.

But this is what usually happens when you’re using a smartlink instead of a dedicated CPA offer. The offers rotate randomly, and the payout is dynamic.

So I’m not mad about it.

The conversion rates are also pretty low, for example, 1 in 1444 users would convert in Nigeria. But that’s expected when the payout is $30 on average and the user has to pull out their credit card.

However in Zimbabwe, I was converting 1 in 14 users, so that’s amazing, but what wasn’t amazing was the revenue I was getting (again dynamic CPA pay rate).

Conclusion

Yeah, so there you have it, as you can see you can get a nice profit and ROI if you’re thinking a bit outside the box.

I never tried advertising in those countries (with dating offers) before… so I had no idea what to expect.

I was surprised to see the results to be honest. I tried replicating this on other less targeted locations and I wasn’t getting $30+ payouts per conversion.

Could I run this CPA campaign a while longer and optimize it even more?

Sure.

Did I get carried away with arbitrage campaigns and other good shit and forgot about it?

YEP.

Do I regret anything?

NO, why would I? It was a fun little experiment, that I’m now putting away for others to get “inspired” (hint: don’t copy everything, you might not get the same results).

Final note: Your results might vary, this was done about 2 years ago…the traffic from PropellerAds in these countries might be totally different now, same can be said for the LosPollos Dating CPA smartlink.

So keep in mind this if you’re going to run the same setup, I don’t want to hear you getting angry in comments because you lost $100 with 0 conversions, kay?

Want to get more tutorials, tips, case studies and other epic sh*t? Subscribe to my email list.

Alright, peace’
Stephen

Share: