Make India hard again. Part 1: getting started

Hi everyone! We have an in-house media buying team in ZorbasMedia that tests various offers and traffic sources. We have decided to launch a special project where one of our team members will test GEOs and traffic sources he hasn’t worked with before. We would like to show that an affiliate with any experience under their belt can follow in our footsteps and get some decent results.

Max, we give the floor to you.

It is a pleasure for me to participate in this project to see if I can secure a positive ROI working with a new ad format and new vertical. And if I can, how much time it will actually take. I’m going to describe everything I will do in as much detail as possible and provide all the screenshots.

First of all, I have set myself two goals: choose an affiliate network and traffic source to work with. When picking up a traffic source, I took the following factors into account:

1. It is supposed to be a source we haven’t worked with before.
2. A source must be simple and easy to understand.
3. A source must have as much traffic as possible for our offer.

I also had to pick up an offer, GEO and affiliate network. After I carefully studied a lot of websites where people discuss various GEOs to drive traffic to, I settled on India. The reasons for this decision are discussed below.

Then, I also had to choose a vertical. The options were as follows:

• Gambling. I wasn’t sure that it would perform well on GEO India.
• Crypto. Hmph…
• WapClick. Low profits.
• Physical products.

I looked up some case studies, talked with my fellow affiliates and decided to settle on physical products. I was advised to drive traffic to nutra. First of all, it appears to be easier than working with physical products. Secondly, it is more profitable. I did a little research on nutra networks and chose Dr.Cash.

The only thing left to do was to contact the network and pick up an offer. After I contacted the network I was convinced that my choice was right. The guys recommended me to work with their adult offers and I decided to give it a go. Why not? I haven’t worked with this GEO before and so this poses quite a challenge to me.

I decided to drive traffic from the TrafficStars ad network.

The tracker I use is Binom.

Now, I would like to explain why my choice fell on India.

Affiliate marketing in India

There are more than 1.3 billion people living in India. Of these, 500 million have Internet access as of 2019. Half of them use social networks on a regular basis.

As compared to 2018, the number of Internet users in India has grown by more than 20%.

It turned out that India is the leading country in the world in terms of Facebook audience size. This is where I could lie and say that I have never worked with Facebook before…

As I have mentioned before, I chose TrafficStars as a traffic source. As for the ad format, I decided to work with native ads. Here is my line of reasoning.

Leveraging users’ engagement with content is much more powerful than brute force advertising. Native ads perfectly match the look and feel of a website and are not supposed to look conspicuous and intrusive. They are shown in the right place and at the right time and provide a better user experience. Native ads basically look like a natural part of a website’s design.

The most popular and effective native ad formats for mobile devices are video ads such as in-article and in-read videos and text and graphic ads (a native unit, carousel, the Recommended section, native scroller).

Now, let’s get back to India. Indians’ interests are varied and diverse. Some of them play games, some watch videos and streams. There are two official languages in India, Hindi and English, and so you can use English-language creatives, which would be impossible if you worked with France or Portugal. Moreover, India is home to Kamasutra, which indicates that Indians have a certain penchant for all things adult. 

Another plus point is a low price per click. It’s also worth noting that there are wealthy cities in India such as Mumbai and Deli where living standards are much higher. So, you can target these cities and get more conversions for practically no money. Well, at least in theory.

Picking up a Dr.Cash offer

Dr.Cash is an affiliate network that focuses on the nutra vertical. The network’s database showcases over 3259 nutra offers from direct advertisers throughout the world: Asia, Europe, Latin America, Eastern GEOs, Africa, CIS, and North America.

Dr.Cash’s super specialization is developing countries. The guys have the freshest offers in the market, rare GEOs, great bids and high caps.

What’s more, they have a cool support team that helped me to pick up the right offers:

• id 17164 Max X – COD – [IN]
• id 18466 Shilajit – COD – [IN]

In my opinion, adult offers are easier to work with and much more profitable. I’m glad that when it comes to choosing an offer my manager and I understand profitability in the same way.

I’m going to discuss how I chose pre-landers and landing pages in my next article. Now, I would like to share with you the creatives I made for my first campaigns.

Banner split test

I took the following approaches when making creatives:

• a happily married Indian couple; no reference to adult themes; the husband wears a mustache (by the way, did you know that low-caste Indian men are not allowed to grow a mustache?);
• adult;
• a picture of dick against a background depicting a happy couple;
• dick pick.

I decided to fork over $200 on tests. Hopefully, I will score a profitable campaign pretty soon.

In my next article, I am going to share the first results of my marketing efforts. Keep your fingers crossed for me!