Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

17 February 2021
2,211
0
Reading: 4 min

 

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

Traffic source: TikTok Ads

GEO: RU

Offers: Fresh Casino, Sol Casino, Maxbet Slots

Campaign time period: 15.12.2020–20.01.2021

Costs: $3280

Revenue: $10493

Net profit: $7212

ROI: 219%

Our first bet was to promote nutra offers on TikTok. However, there were some scaling issues, and so we decided to give gambling a try.

NB: When our advertising campaigns were in full swing, online casinos and betting firms in Russia stopped accepting payments via some of the most popular digital wallets and payment systems. I think everyone is aware of this. Even so, we managed to generate quite a profit.

Ad accounts

We launched our ads from pre-paid TikTok accounts registered in Russia. We used ZennoPoster to code a simple account registration tool, campaign launcher, and account checker.

With the help of the automatic account registration solution, we were able to get an unlimited number of accounts on a daily basis. The campaign launcher ran ads on TikTok in the nighttime, while the job of the account checker was to check the approved accounts.

During the workday, we topped up our accounts and launched campaigns.

Once an account got banned, we logged into another one that had approved ads, topped up the account balance, and relaunched our campaign.

The account lifetime was very short. Some of the accounts didn’t spend more than 500 rubles (≈$7), some — more than 1000 rubles(≈$15), and there were very few of them that spent 2000 rubles (≈$30).

You don’t have to bother with writing your own automated campaign launcher now, as the guys from Dolphin have recently rolled out a solution for launching your campaign on TikTok. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Creative angles

The trickiest part was making our creatives and getting our ads approved. We had to strike a delicate balance between a more white-hat approach to get approval and a more grey-hat approach to generate a decent conversion rate.

Here are a couple of creative angles that we used:

Clips of gameplay with a gambling-associated soundtrack. We used casual gameplay clips and a voiceover saying something like this, “Install the app, sign up, spin slots and win!” As a rule, this angle was quite effective conversion-wise.

Influencers. Clips of bloggers advertising various apps/games with a clear call to action, etc.

Our own in-house creatives, such as videos like those trending on TikTok. This angle was also pretty successful in terms of the approval and conversion rates.

Here are some examples:

Check out my Telegram channel for more.

Apps

When we launched our first ads, we saw that the apps bound to our accounts got flagged pretty quickly. So, we decided to use cloaking and send the traffic to an AppsFlyer tracking link. We paid for the traffic that we got and didn’t optimize our campaigns, however, the initial results were very promising.

The install prices were within the 20-60 rubles ($0,3-0,8) range, which is great if you compare it to Facebook.

Pre-lander

After a while, the install prices soared. We changed our campaign objective to conversions and decided to use a pre-lander to pay only for quality traffic and be able to optimize our campaigns based on clicks.

Here’s our pre-lander:

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

Things improved once we launched a pre-lander and TikTok started optimizing our marketing efforts.

If you don’t know how to install a pixel on a call-to-action button, you can reach out to me on Telegram: @levland.

Here are the overall results:

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

Promoting gambling offers became increasingly difficult in late January. The accounts were banned even more often and didn’t spend as much as 200 rubles ($3). That’s why we made up our mind to stop advertising gambling in Russia for the time being.

I think that now it’s still possible to generate good traffic volumes, so you can go give it a try.

After that, we decided to test out sweepstakes. Although we hadn’t promoted this offer vertical before, we managed to launch a number of successful campaigns.

Case Study: Running Gambling Offers on TikTok with a $7000 Profit

So, we have already spent over $7000 on traffic but haven’t figured out yet how to drive sustainably high traffic volumes.

In my next article, I’m going to share more details about our sweepstake campaigns. You can check out my Telegram channel for more.

Source: Lev

Have a story to tell about traffic arbitrage?
Become a ZorbasMedia contributor!
Become an author