Guest post: My media buying adventure in the Dating vertical with Traffic Company.

At Traffic Company, we believe that the best way to highlight the potential of our inhouse dating offers is to let our partners speak for themselves. That's why we asked one of our publishers, who had already been testing dating campaigns in the US, to share his experience trying out our inhouse offers in unexplored GEO's. 

My media buying adventure in the Dating vertical  with Traffic Company.

I have been running dating for some time now with the main focus on the US with some dating advertisers (like Advidi). However, my main income stream still came from other verticals such as mobile content. I know Traffic Company for 2 years now but never knew they had their own inhouse dating products. My Traffic Company account manager told me about it and asked if I wanted to give it a try, and perhaps, write a blog about it as well. 

The geo’s they had live weren’t interesting for me as I’ve been mainly focussed on bigger countries like the US. Though I decided to give it a try after a conversation with my industry friend who has been testing the campaigns, and he was pretty enthusiastic. So eventually I decided to try them. 

I’ve learned that smaller GEO’s can be hidden gems as they have less competition, cheaper CPCs, and a chance to build solid data without burning budget. It felt like a low-risk way to experiment with different dating geos and possibly unlock some other profitable markets without heavily shifting away from my main focus. On top of that, Traffic Company’s inhouse offers meant I had direct feedback on quality, which is gold when optimizing dating funnels. 

Anyway, to give better insight into my journey, I’ve divided it into phases. 

Phase 1: Setting up the ''Sletplaats'' Campaign

I already had the set up to run dating campaigns, so getting started wasn’t a challenge for me. I manage a few Facebook accounts and track performance using Keitaro. Connecting this with my Traffic Company account was easy. I was thinking to start with The Netherlands but eventually went with Belgium first and go from there. First I did some research on which creatives are popular in Belgium and from that I tried to make something similar. 

Tip: Spy tools or ad libraries can be helpful for this kind of research. 

I used AdHeart to browse localized angles and found that ‘’socially-proofed’’ creatives (like chat screenshots or blurred profile images) perform best with dating.

Unfortunately my first campaigns were facing some issues. I forgot about the fact that Belgium has two languages, and the campaigns only supported Dutch. To top things off, I also faced some disapprovals on my ads. However, after some tweaking, my campaigns finally went live. From there on I decided to limit my start budget to, as I wanted to start slow and avoid the risk of losing a lot of money straight away.. 

In my opinion it’s better to play it safe at first, no need to burn accounts while testing. 

For starters: use warmed-up pages, rotate creatives, and never push value too fast, especially on Facebook. I always keep things simple by using CBO with wide interest and age settings, and let the algorithm figure out what works best.

Phase 2: First results.

€50 Daily was the budget I decided to start with. I got offered a cap of 10 per day from Traffic Company as they wanted to check quality first, so I thought €50 would be enough to do that. 

Unfortunately, I made some setup errors.. I targeted a demographic that was too young, and exceeded the cap with bad quality leads. My account manager gave me this feedback and advised me to change the audience targeting to 40+ (age) users only, as their buying intentions are higher and deliver higher quality leads, ensuring a cap and payout increase. Anyway, it’s been a good reminder that dating offers often work best with older target groups, especially in tier 1 countries. In my experience, they definitely converted better and delivered higher quality leads. I started split testing age groups versus each other, but what I noticed is that it made the traffic much more expensive to target small groups. I would recommend to select a high age (40+ in my case), and target everything above it. After implementing this change, I received no negative feedback from my account manager and Traffic Company's quality team. 

Phase 3: Time to optimize.

After I made the necessary changes on my end, my traffic got a little more expensive (luckily still in the green). I also got positive feedback this time, and was able to run the campaigns on an interesting ROI of 60. Traffic Company gave me the green light after this, which allowed me to look into different geo’s and to test different hooks.

Once i had stable performance, I began testing new creatives and headlines, mainly to improve CTR. A/B testing was key here, especially in the first few days after scaling. 

I mainly tested things like image style, button colors, etc. In dating, my experience is that even small tweaks like changing ‘Join Now’ to ‘Find Your Match’ can make a big difference. 

In the meantime I also kept in contact with my Account Manager at Traffic company regarding the lead quality.

Phase 4: Expanding.

After making my campaign profitable and getting the green light, I got a higher daily cap for Belgium. As Belgium and the Netherlands speak the same language, this wasn't that difficult (I used the same creatives that I now use for Belgium), only with some minor tweaks like localised flags, but also a localised voiceover. 

I never like to put all my eggs in one basket, so I decided to run other BE and NL dating campaigns with a different advertiser as well. After split testing for a few days, and some ‘’average’’ results, the BE and NL campaigns from Traffic Company were giving me a higher ROI (this was over the course of 900+ leads).

Famous last words.

I can recommend trying Traffic Company’s dating offers, however, I would say it’s important to have some knowledge of the dating market. There are a lot of tiny mistakes you are able to make, and the quality is more strict than in some other verticals. Take it slow, build up gradually and focus on quality, the early days are important in this vertical.  

That said, if you’re detail-oriented and willing to test, the dating vertical can be very rewarding. Especially with the right partners.