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The transformation of the Sweepstake Market.

Adavice DSP

Traffic Company

Super Contributor
Partner
Joined
Feb 6, 2020
Messages
119
Sweepstakes are an easy money maker, however, with the years - more and more restrictions were imposed. Nowadays, visitors have to fill in a lot more information compared to 10 years ago. Legislations became stricter, companies like IKEA warned their customers about false advertising, conversion rates dropped, and rejection rates rose. There sure is potential, but with all that is mentioned above, is it still worth the ride?

2019 Was a year of brainstorming: ‘How can we transform the sweepstake market?’. We figured it out. Early 2020 we launched our Click-to-Call offers: 1-click-flow, sweepstake based, converting on a call and most importantly: no rejections, no restrictions and no caps.

After a couple of weeks we asked one of our top performing publishers to write a case study about his first experience with our Click-to-Call offers in order to help other publishers and to provide more insight. The outcome and key lessons of this case study can be formulated as follows:

Traffic
The traffic types that do the trick when it comes to Click-to-Call are push, pop, and social traffic (as long as it’s no bot). In general, push is more expensive than pop-under traffic, however, the conversion rate and quality is much higher. Whereas, pop-under traffic is cheap, easy to set up and scale. On the other hand, as mentioned above, conversion rates and quality are considerably lower. Another option is social traffic, which is easy to use and more precise to target which you will also see in your results. Therefore, it can be recommended to mix different traffic types and work with the best of both worlds.

Volumes
The Click-to-Call offers are based on revshare. Our publisher discovered that low volumes caused a fluctuation in payout and could easily turn yesterday’s profitable campaign into a loss today. Therefore, our publisher decided to run bigger volumes, so he could minimise the risk and decrease the chance of relatively high fluctuations. With this strategy revenue increased as shown below.



ROI
Some campaigns have a lower ROI. Don’t be afraid to see that happen, because this is expected with Click-to-Call offers. One day a campaign can have a negative -1% ROI, and the next day the same campaign can have a 100% positive ROI. This can be seen in the example below.



Prelanders
Focus on the CR instead of the CTR. Some prelanders have a lower CTR, but an amazing CR. This can be seen in the example below. In this case our publisher would choose for the second lander based on the CR, and eventually profit. Keep in mind, that in the end - the prelander with the highest CR will always win.



Creatives
Your creative angle is important on push traffic, however this is not everything. Our publisher found out that even if a clickbait headline didn’t match the prelander, the performance would not drop. Suggested is to always aim for 1% CTR on your creatives, depending on sources and age of the push subscriber list.

Managing campaigns
Click-to-Call offers are available in almost every country. It is a lot of work managing hundreds of campaigns manually. With the provided feedback we created a Click-to-Call performance API where you can see the performance of GEO’s and carriers on a realtime basis (this updates every 15 minutes). With this in mind, our publisher decided to hire someone to develop a system that would be able to access the API, turning campaigns on and off automatically when the eCPM of a carrier goes up or down. This is how it was done:

‘’I create a campaign in my tracker, for example targeting Algeria, Djezzy, and submit it to a traffic source. I use the Campaign ID that is listed in the traffic source as the identifier my system should use if it wants to enable or disable a campaign. I add the Campaign ID to my system and link it to the geo and carrier I am targeting, specify the minimal eCPM I want it to have before enabling the campaign. This minimal eCPM you set is a bit of guesswork at the start, but soon you’ll find out what the minimal eCPM needs to be for your campaign for it to be profitable. My system reads the API every 15 minutes and checks all geo’s and carriers for their current eCPM. Then it compares the minimal threshold I set to what the actual eCPM is for that carrier and if the eCPM is sufficient it enables the campaign via an API call to the traffic source’’.



After weeks of testing we were confident enough to expand, and boy we did! 🔥
We started off with only a few countries, and now we are live in more than 50+ countries and counting.
 
Adavice DSP
I know many affiliates killing it with your IVR offers. It has definitely changed how people run sweeps and I'm seeing other companies try to duplicate it now too. Pretty awesome. Let's hope the conversion rates keep going up :D
 
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