Facebook and gambling. Part one

Hi everyone! My name is Andrei. I’m from Nashiba.pro team and I work with gambling offers to foreign GEOs via Facebook. We use iOS and Android applications.

Back then, I started from white hat nutra offers to CIS countries, as many did. However, it all had a very disappointing ROI.

Then I worked with nutra offers to Asian countries, diet pills to Latin America and viagra offers to Europe and Asia. And, of course, these campaigns had much higher ROI than the first ones. Especially viagra offers. However, the number of bans increased as well. The main difficulty was not the scaling methods, but the search for accounts. 

By the way, when you run for other Objectives, Facebook is not so picky. I won’t say that it held me back, I continue running traffic to black hat offers and find new approaches to get positive ROI using the “Conversion” Advertising Objective.

I heard some stuff about this vertical and I have always been curious to learn the specifics of driving Facebook traffic to gambling offers via applications. The main attraction for me was ROI to foreign GEO’s via mobile applications.

Myths and rumors about gambling vertical

What I managed to verify:

1. Gambling has the highest ROI. Most likely. But, as always, there are many things you should consider and perform in order to reach high ROI.
2. Driving to foreign gambling offers is difficult. There’s a lot of competition. No more than for the CIS countries. And accounts live longer with the right approach. And I saw no difference in terms of competition.
3. Gambling is difficult and only top affiliates can master this vertical. Definitely not. Gambling has a number of specific terms and metrics to analyze, there are some distinctive features. Gambling requires a bigger turnover for testing and scaling, but it’s definitely accessible to all affiliates, not only to the top ones.
4. Advertisers often don’t approve the whole bulk of traffic and hold may be up to 30 days. Advertiser wants you to drive traffic to his offer, so if your traffic in of high quality (for example, from Facebook), there will be no admission problems. And hold is subject to individual agreements. You can settle for 14 days.
5. It’s impossible to find any good apps in affiliate programs, and it’s very expensive to develop one’s own. If you’re persistent, you can find a good affiliate network with an additional mobile application feature. And then you will have no headache with competition. Perhaps I just got lucky. I managed to find such network almost at once (Olimob). They eased my launch and supplied me with the tools that I needed for the analysis.
6. It’s easier to start from applications, campaigns will live longer. It’s definitely true for foreign gambling offers. The main issue is the lifetime of the app in the App Store or Play Market (the target content is implemented inside the app itself). But it’s more of a technical issue and you just have to find a good IT specialist. I think more about scaling on each account, than in the case of driving traffic to landings with the ”Conversion” Objective.

Choosing offers and analyzing the audience

To choose an offer I always look first at GEO and its specifics. The more I know about gamblers at specific GEO, the better campaigns and creatives I develop. It’s just perfect when some affiliate program has a ready detailed analysis of the GEO you need. I’ve seen such perks at Alfaleads, for example. In this case, I highly recommend getting your hands on such analysis. This will be a rather profitable investment.

Regardless of GEO, gambling target audience is divided into two groups: those who play for money (the majority in the CIS countries) and those who play for fun and emotional experience (mainly in Europe, Canada, the USA, Australia).

While analyzing the offer I recommend evaluating not only the payout, statistics of affiliate network and price of deposit and registration. In addition, you better talk to your manager about the advertiser and his record of cooperation. Of course, the manager may pursue his own interests at your expense, but this is the matter of communication and your ability to get the right answers from the support service. The experience of your fellow affiliates may also be helpful in choosing an offer. Networking is vital in affiliate marketing, as well as citing of the offer on various websites for affiliates.

With a detailed analysis of the GEO, you can plan the first tests. Let’s look at Turkey as an example.

Therefore, I would develop football themed creatives with a reference to gambling. The text would also have to be sporty and emotional to match the local football club culture. Target audience – relatively young and active men. Android smartphones are the most popular in Turkey, that’s our target too. I would develop five different creatives and texts to test this assumption.

In the next article, we will consider the main approaches to testing in gambling offers. Then we’ll see how the results go with a real advertising campaign. Your questions and comments are very much welcome!