Have almost all affiliates promoting dating thru PPC gone away?

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ebizpoint

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May 2, 2008
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Being affiliate, I'm trying to figure out how to promote dating offers via PPC advertising. I've been analyzing dating related PPC ads across main PPC providers - Adwords and YSM for a month. I've typed different keywords: long and short tail related to different general and niche dating topics. But I've almost always seen only advertisers' ppc ads and really rarely affiliates.

I'm not talking about SEo, article marketing, etc. just about PPC advertising. Is it still profitable to promote dating offers being affiliate and using Adwords and YahooSM? Why have almost all affiliates promoting dating gone away?
Maybe nowadays it's better to try some other methods to promote dating offers. My budget is low and I cannot afford to spend thousands of USD just to test all dating related keywords and compete solely with advertisers' own PPC ads.
 


some sites/advertisers use a top performing affiliate as their AOR (agent of record), which means only that affiliate can use the domain as the display url. at least through the network that both the affiliate and the advertiser are working with.

margins are so low with free sign up dating offers they're hardly worth promoting IMO... unless you happen to be good at converting paying members to get the 10x payout.
 
sorry for the double post, but i suspect if you ran a survey/email signup page like datingwithoutdrama.com as CPM on high CTR content sites, you might have some luck by emailing dating offers to your signups. you could also redirect to a dating site after they post their email. :)
 
Thanks, guys for your replies. I asked a similar question twice on digitalpoint but no one answered me. It seems, Wikedfire members are more talkative and open-minded.
ROIShareTeam said:
How do you know that it's the direct advertisers, not the affiliates? Many affiliates direct link; especially in the dating niche.
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Because Adwords allows just one ad per search query for advertisers sharing the same top-level domain in the display URL, so i guess we see just advertisers own ads.
Also I've checked, about 60-70% of these dating advertisers (especially medium and small) haven't their own affiliate programs.

jenzkc said:
some sites/advertisers use a top performing affiliate as their AOR (agent of record), which means only that affiliate can use the domain as the display url. at least through the network that both the affiliate and the advertiser are working with.

margins are so low with free sign up dating offers they're hardly worth promoting IMO... unless you happen to be good at converting paying members to get the 10x payout.
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It's sad but it seems to be true.
jenzkc said:
sorry for the double post, but i suspect if you ran a survey/email signup page like datingwithoutdrama.com as CPM on high CTR content sites, you might have some luck by emailing dating offers to your signups. you could also redirect to a dating site after they post their email. :)
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thanks for the tip!
 
Fucking speaking of dating... not pushing through PPC, but Mate1 hasn't converted AT ALL for me today, when I normally get around 10 leads.

Pissing me the fuck off!
 
dating is a tough niche to crack and be profitable, you need a little budget to start. There are affiliates still promoting dating through ppc and making money. You just need to be patient and try new things.

No one is going to give you an answer and say hey I'm promoting so much dating right and this is how I'm doing it. Save a few hundred up get a few hundred keywords and try them and when that fails try a few hundred more rinse and repeat and eventually you will start making money.

Placement targeting and buying ads on a website that gets a targeted demographic will help you make money also but then again you need a budget for that.
 
You may want to consider going the white label route, its low cost to start:

typically a company will provide a ready made dating platform to which you just ad your brand and design,all hosted for you. A database of users,backend and payments are all looked after. All you do is market it and earn when you generate new users.

This means you can chose to optimise for a really tight niche where you may have a better chance of getting traction quicker,. There are still some moderately underserved dating niches out there, when I researched it recently as its one of the projects I am into at the mo. You can get a deal with a decent ongoing rev share of subscriptions and ongoing support from the team to help you get going.
 
Thanks johnysc430, Shina.

johnysc430 said:
No one is going to give you an answer and say hey I'm promoting so much dating right and this is how I'm doing it.
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I'm not trying to get tips how they are doing that. Just I don't want to compete solely with advertisers. Because it's nonsense. I'm targeting Yahoo PPC ads. I use comparison style landing pages. My average cpc on Yahoo is $0.5. My top performer -True.com pays me $1.85 per lead. My conversion (Yahoo ads > My landing page > true.com fill out form page > True.com thanks page) is around 1:10 . So I spend three times more than earn. Can my campaigns still be profitable? No.

johnysc430 said:
Save a few hundred up get a few hundred keywords and try them and when that fails try a few hundred more rinse and repeat and eventually you will start making money.
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I'm doing it. My keywords are very targeted they are all 2-4 words phrases. But It's still not profitable. Oh, even when my Content Match is OFF 2/3 of my Yahoo traffic is coming from parked domains, other non-yahoo search places. Maybe better I have to try Adwords!

Shina said:
You may want to consider going the white label route, its low cost to start:
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I've heard about it. Some super affiliates mentioned you have to push a lot of traffic/leads before that.
 
Ok. So people don't pay for online dating during shitty economic times. Their free: paid ratio plummeting, means the scrub/payouts are down. Anyone with a whitelable on dating knows how many leads disappear.
I can get no scrub offers now, but the given age demographics are insane.
 
xmcp123, if I correct understand leads-to-sales conversion are constantly decreasing, that's why advertisers lower payouts so it isn't the best time to jump into dating industry. correct!
 
ebizpoint said:
xmcp123, if I correct understand leads-to-sales conversion are constantly decreasing, that's why advertisers lower payouts so it isn't the best time to jump into dating industry. correct!
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I wouldn't. I have an affiliate masochistic streak so I give it a try every so often, but the conversions are fucking shit compared to what they used to be. If you can find places frequented by older age groups, you're fine. But 18-22 year olds? forget about it.
In my opinion anyways.
 
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