Case Study: $13 187 in one month on content traffic in Europe
Period: 01.10.2023 — 31.10.2023
GEO: Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia
Hey everyone! We successfully cast quite a few geos, but always want more. And when it comes to testing new locations — the question usually arises: does what we launch accurately show us the real picture? Or by launching, for example, Nutra instead of Crypto we could get a foothold in geo with good results, even though the first tests have weak math? It turns out to be a kind of Schrödinger's arbitrage: the traffic seems to be there, but we cannot draw unambiguous conclusions.
It is in such situations that the LuckyFeed news showcase comes to our rescue: it is a ready-made site filled with interesting content, around which affiliate-links of various offerers of the widest possible range of verticals — from nutra to crypto — are placed.
Advertising teasers on the showcase are arranged in the most effective order for traffic monetization, thanks to which the profitability of such platform almost always remains at the level of pouring on direct offers, and often — even higher.
The purpose of our spill: to determine whether we can buy a serious volume of traffic in the plus from individual geos and whether this traffic will be of high quality.
- We get primary data on the quality of redeemable traffic. Without losing traffic, we estimate the breakdown of the showcase on the news.
- By tracking news breakdown and conversion, we can determine how «quality» a particular site is. With this approach, it takes little time and money to create an initial blacklist.
- Once we get the first conversions on the showcase, we can see which verticals users are more interested in in certain geos and which offerers are better served there. If we see a sharp skew, we can launch these providers directly. If we see that the distribution of verticals on the showcase is relatively even, we realize that a mix of offers will be the best option for us.
- When working with a news showcase, you can use both hard and neutral creos: this helps you understand how strict moderation is in geo. We start with relatively light creatives, gradually sending more and more clickable headlines and images for moderation.
We run quite a few different creos for testing:
- thrash-news — «top 10 scariest people on the planet», «boa constrictor swallowed a girl whole», «donated device — ended badly».
- lifehacks — «why burn bay leaf», «put an onion in a sock before bed — you'll be surprised in the morning», «how to fix a broken smartphone».
The tests showed that we get the highest conversion rate from users 50+, so we finally settled on the category «News for pensioners».
Here are some examples of successful creos:
Secrets of a successful storefront creo:
- A catchy image that generates a lot of interest and creates resonance with the target audience.
- A time limit or indication of the «freshness/urgency» of the news.
- A clearly worded short headline.
- And a quick trick to increase the length of an informational message by 20-30 characters: a small amount of text can be added to a picture.
A few more examples of creatives and links to news stories:
News about the destruction of the Hungarian pension system by inflation and the consideration of further increases in the retirement age. Uses a clickable provocative headline to attract the attention of people 50+.
News about the upcoming standard of living of pensioners in Poland: whether their situation will improve or worsen during the rule of Donald Tusk, who plans to become Prime Minister. As in the previous case, a clickable headline is used, which touches upon a topic that is of great interest to elderly citizens.
News about «gigantic» pensions in Poland and possibilities to accumulate a large pension capital under certain conditions. An associative approach is used here: people see money bills, news about large pension payments — they associate it with improved living standards and want to click on the article and read it.
News about a possible increase in pensions in the Czech Republic from January. A clear, short headline with an infographic and concrete figures that makes you interested in the content and click on it.
We work with our own farmed accounts. There is nothing special about farming: we prepare one trusted MCC and warm up its paywall with white ads. Then on this MCC add new subsidiary accounts, and already from them we start traffic, paying it from the warmed on MCC payment. Geo — Ukraine and Poland. However, even in this case we often get banned for suspicious payments, so our arsenal is not only farming, but also purchased agency accounts. We used about 30 accounts: some lived the whole month, some were banned after a couple of days.
We've been using and enjoying cloaca Palladium lately. On the plus side: very cool support, quality filtering and still little traffic loss. This is not an advertisement, but a real review: sending their team rays of goodness.
When working with Google, most often the rule of thumb is: the wider audience settings you put out — the cheaper and more traffic you can buy out. That's why we always try to start with the widest possible targeting settings. However, within reason, at the start:
- Disable entertainment categories.
- If there is a proven blacklist of sites — activate it (for example, we always add sites with TV series, anime, manga, apps and platforms with games to the blacklist).
Further, depending on the results obtained on different accounts can reduce targeting by age and disable frankly non-converting sites and users (by gender, interests, categories of sites and other parameters). All of this depends on the specific creo, so each account starts with a broad cast and then goes through the optimization path.
These are the results we got in a month of broadshedding:
Also during this time we saw that:
- The audience on the selected geos on Google is live.
- Buying traffic from this source can and should be done.
- There is no sure skew of users' interests to a particular vertical, so we decided to continue buying traffic not directly to the offerers, but to the news showcase.
- Showcase once again helped us save time and money on tests: we quickly and efficiently checked the quality of traffic.
- Such platforms provide a wide range of opportunities for testing creos: from the most lite to thrash content and allow us to quickly and efficiently weed out uncontroversial ones.
- We saved a lot of resources: human, time, and material, because the smart advertising output of the news showcase independently selected ads for the target audience, monetizing traffic as efficiently as possible without any effort on our part.
If you generate large volumes of quality traffic and want to test the news feed — we recommend you to test the LuckyFeed platform. You can apply for access to the platform on their website.