Case Study: Driving Facebook Traffic to a WebView Android App. $2700 profit

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Hi everybody!

This case study deals with driving Facebook traffic to an Android app. This line of work is rather profitable now, but there is very little information available on this topic that would shed light on some details and nuances. In this case study, we’re going to share our experience and give you some tips on making your campaigns profitable.

Gambling is a highly competitive vertical, especially if you are working with Russia and CIS countries. However, if you manage to find the right approach and choose the right reliable partner, then you’ll be able to make a good profit.

Our approach in a nutshell: a user downloads a Google Play app, and then a built-in WebView browser opens an advertiser’s webpage. The topic of building such apps deserves a separate article, but we are not going to touch upon it now, as our friends at WelcomePartners provide apps to affiliates and save you the trouble.

We decided to drive traffic to club-vulkan.com. This is a tried-and-true product that is widely known in the Russian and CIS market. It belongs to Vulkan (or Volcano in English), a well-established brand that is popular among gamblers and enjoys a high level of trust.

We launched App Install campaigns on Facebook and opted for the pay-per-install model.

Creatives and target audience

We took two different approaches depending on the audience segment:

• if your audience wants to earn some quick money, use storytelling techniques;
• if your audience is problem gamblers, then play on emotions.

When running Facebook campaigns, we came up with two hypotheses regarding our target audience. The first one concerned people seeking quick money. The funnel involved stories about ordinary people hitting the jackpot after depositing a mere couple of dollars and the following video creatives:

Picture 1: Click Download. Ordinary Russians got themselves a nice pension. Picture 2: He got 1,500,000. He made a deposit and won.

What other creatives are used most often: celebrities, real-life stories about people who won a jackpot/lottery. All this is then adapted for mobile slots. When making these creatives, you can unleash your imagination and enjoy a wide variety of source materials.

The advantages of this approach:

• low price per install;
• a wider audience.

The disadvantages:

• it’s difficult to get quality traffic;
• unstable conversion rate.

The second hypothesis concerns problem gamblers, the very target audience that online casinos are trying to reach. This audience is difficult to work with but it is willing to pay, and these are exactly the guys that will show the highest return on investment (and casino statistics reveals that your traffic will pay off in 4-6 months) and bring a lot of profit to a casino. We tried to hook this audience using the creatives that are given below. We opted for an emotional approach and used slot machines and emotionally charged visuals in our creatives.

Picture 1: Everyone can gain this with this app. Picture 2: Colossal winnings.

We continue using these approaches and their variations in our campaigns, and so you can borrow these ideas, make your own video creatives and probably get some decent ROI and a good profit.

Analysis of challenges

When running our campaigns, we came across a number of difficulties:

• Apps

The major advantage of WelcomePartners is that they have their own in-house apps that they give to their affiliates without charging any commission (the market average is 5-10% from your turnover for leasing an app). This was crucial for us, as at some point all our apps were blocked. For our traffic to keep on working, we borrowed some apps from WelcomePartners.

• Bans

Facebook and constant bans go hand in hand. To those who have only started figuring out this vertical, we recommend using a conservative strategy and increasing the budget gradually. In this case, your accounts will live longer.

• Traffic quality

This is a very important metric. Taking into account that the baseline is about $3.12 (200 rubles), you should carefully monitor the quality of your traffic. Those who want to get rich fast are generally bad quality traffic. Problem gamblers show better results, but this traffic is also more expensive.

• Hold period

If you have enough traffic volumes, WelcomePartners can reduce the hold period.

Conclusions

Having analyzed our ad campaigns, we came to the following conclusions:

• Be sure to keep a close eye on your target audience and the demographics of the traffic you are running. Males aged over 25 convert the best. The very same audience is also the best quality-wise.
• Pay close attention to analytics from the perspective of your creatives, do not consider the price per install only.
• Keep track of your traffic quality, analyze the size of the first deposit and the metrics for recurring deposits.
• In the long run, video creatives perform better than images in terms of traffic quality and price per install.

The overall conclusion is that even on highly competitive and burnt out geos it is possible to run profitable campaigns given that you have chosen the right affiliate network and keep close track of campaign analytics.

Start making money with a reliable affiliate network — WelcomePartners!