Promoting gambling offers in CIS and beyond. A joint project by ZorbasMedia and Pin-Up Partners

Hello there! Today, we are launching our new special project on driving Facebook traffic to online gambling offers. 

We have set ourselves a goal to answer the following questions:  

• What are the specifics of our target audience in a particular GEO?  
• How to scale up the smart way? 
• What is the best campaign optimization strategy?   

The first part of our project is dedicated to testing out new GEOs available in affiliate program Pin-Up Partners. 

A few words about affiliate tools and services we use: 

• Anti-detect browser Indigo; 
• Spy tool AdHeart; 
• Binom Tracker; 
• Campaign management service FB Tool + our own in-house solution. 

As for Facebook accounts, we are not going to discuss account farming and warm-up in this issue. Advertising on Facebook has never been stable, and now we have to change our strategies and approaches almost every week, day, and even hour.  

The only thing we are going to mention is that we use: 

• auto-registered accounts + in-house account farming;  
• rented accounts + BMs; 
• accounts farmed by our team. 

All auto-registered and Business Manager accounts have been bought in online stores. We build our own apps or rent them when needed. 

Before we start 

Let’s move on to testing. Pin-Up has recently expanded its reach and added two countries to its database, Azerbaijan and Portugal. We have run our ads in Portugal before, and so these GEOs seemed quite attractive to us. 

Tip #1. Before launching test campaigns, always ask your manager for average KPIs in a given GEO. This will allow you to better understand what metrics to focus on when analyzing the test results.  

Here’s the data that was provided by our Pin-Up manager:  

• Azerbaijan: the average reg2dep is 1 to 8 
• Portugal: the average reg2dep for traffic volumes from 100 FTDs is 1 to 12

 Tip #2. If online gambling is something of a novelty in a GEO you’re advertising in, test out both ad images and videos. The results can be surprising. There are still a few more reasons to test images alongside video creatives: the cost per install is two or even three times lower, while the audience reach is much higher because there are more placements available for images.  

Testing and creative angles 

Do a little research before you start making creatives and find out what languages are spoken by the majority of the country’s population. The primary language of Azerbaijan is Azerbaijani, but the older generation speaks Russian fluently as a second language. This means that you can test creatives in different languages depending on your targeting settings, which is good. Moreover, bear in mind that the most commonly practiced religion in the country is Islam, and so it is likely that images displaying girls won’t convert well. However, this hypothesis has yet to be confirmed by the test results. 

Portugal’s official language is Portuguese. It is difficult to distinguish any pronounced features of advertising in this GEO. However, note that online casinos aren’t something new in Portugal, and so it will be easier for you to come up with marketing strategies and creative angles.  

It would be a bad idea to copycat spy tool creatives, but this doesn’t mean that spy services won’t come in handy. They can help you find out what your competitors are running and analyze the recent trends. You will need this information when making and adapting your creatives for a particular GEO. Creatives that are made based on analyzing the best practices will perform much better than those that you have copied.  

Then, we need to pick up the right target audience and decide what types of creatives we are going to use

Azerbaijan is a new GEO when it comes to online gambling, and so we decided to test out both images and video creatives. Let’s start with the standard images. As for videos, we are going to use slots and play on emotions. Since Azerbaijan is predominantly a Muslim country, it would be ill-advised to use images and videos featuring women. 

Our target audience is males aged 23+.  

We also going to put a Russian-language creative to a split-test and target males aged 30+. 

Portugal is a quite popular GEO in the online gambling industry. So, we are going to target three separate audience segments such as: 

• males aged 23+; 
•  males and females aged 23+; 
•  females aged 23+. 

Creative angle: slots+emotions. 

What creative angles we use 

• Slots+emotions is a pretty conventional approach in gambling. Another angle that we use is slots+emotions+a misleading text designed to attract motivated traffic.  
• Video creatives that tell you about a person who hit the jackpot are hard to work with because you have to invest a lot in the creative itself and monitor traffic quality. 
• Pseudo-news videos can be very difficult to produce. 
• Creatives featuring slots and playing on emotions are the most difficult to make in terms of picking up the right audience, the most expensive in terms of installs, and at the same time the best performing profit-wise.  

In our next article, we will break down the specifics of advertising in each of these GEOs. 

First of all, we are going to talk about Azerbaijan. 

We will discuss: 

• the performance of our ad images
• the performance of Russian-language creatives
• the performance of video creatives 
• our plans for the future
• the specifics of this GEO