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It’s actually day 3 here, but I had a busy day yesterday and as such was unable to write a new post in time. No worries though, as the day is still young, and later tonight I’ll have a 3rd campaign ready for you guys to build off of. Today, we’re going to be diving a bit into the gambling niche with an offer I’ve actually run before, Bingo Cabin.

Gambling can be a tricky niche. Facebook says they allow it, but then they say they don’t allow it, so you’ll probably have disapproval nightmares trying to run it there (although I bet that’d be where you’d have massive profits. Bingo Cabin is a proven converter on display and banner traffic, though, so that is what a majority of this post will focus on. We’ll touch on PlentyofFish, as well.

The Offer

This offer is available on a wide range of affiliate networks, ranging from $3.75 payouts all the way up to incentivized versions with near $50 payouts (you can find who has what offers by checking out oDigger). EWA Network, one of the hottest affiliate networks this side of the universe has it at a street payout of $10. I know they can do better than this, so ask for a payout bump if you want to work with them. Don’t limit yourself, though. Always test your traffic across multiple affiliate networks. What I’ll usually do is run my traffic across the two highest converting networks, so I always have a fallback if one network takes the offer down or starts scrubbing me too hard. Scrubbing is truly destroying the affiliate marketing space, but its just something that you’ll have to deal with until advertisers should just start paying less for no-scrub traffic and networks refusing to pay on ill-received traffic.

Also, bear in mind that there are multiple bingo offers available out there. You should always split test offers when the option to do so is available.

Anyways, lets take a look at the landing page.

I really love this offer landing page. It screams “DIRECT LINK, MAKE MONIES!”. We’ve got lots of options here, whether you want to play bingo or slots or other casino games, you’ll be able to more broadly target this across gambling traffic rather than just hitting those that need to play bingo. We’ve also got an assortment of normal looking stay at home moms in the “testimonial section” near the bottom. We can assume this will be our target market (and it is).

The way this offer converts is a rather long path, however. First the user must click the link above, then they’ll have to download the software, then they have to register, then they can play. I assume that is when you get paid out. Again, though, the way this offer page works out, it takes a lot of what you might want to include on your own LP out of the question as they already do it for you. It will depend how you target the offer, on whether or not you want to include a landing page. For how I’ll be targeting, I will just be direct linking.

Another thing to keep in mind about the offer is that it is not available in the United States as online gambling is outlawed.

Basic Research

As stated before, most of your optimal targets will probably be bored, stay at home moms. Again, this is apparent when you see the Jackpot winners section near the bottom. Unfortunately, Quantcast has no information really available and Alexa’s stats seem skewed. The Google Ad Planner (Double Click Ad Planner now), has no relevant data available either.

In some cases there just won’t be much available public data to browse through. In this case you can try searching for media kits, press releases and browsing magazines to find optimal demographic information. A quick search for Bingo demographics actually gave me some shocking information that nearly 25% of all online bingo players are under the age of 25. I was originally planning on targeting just those 30 and up before I read this. Hey, we can’t always be right!

So with this new data, I plan to target women that stay at home, are 18 and up (for legal reasons, obviously), and probably have low educations and no income.

Where to Run This Offer

While I won’t say this is a great place to run the offer, but it will be a great place to get significant data and a few conversions – PlentyofFish Ads. Here, we can set out our targeting plain and simple like follows:

Let me talk a little about who I’m targeting here, and why.

Gender – The offer page is obviously targeted for women. While you might have a few male conversions, women will far outweigh in the ROI department.

Login Count – If someone has logged in to PoF 1000 times, they’re probably banner blind. This is a number you will want to play with a little more, as you might still have positive ROI at higher login counts, or 100 might not be low enough to get any clicks.

Games and Puzzles – Most women probably won’t set this in their profiles, at least I can’t imagine they would. This could cut into the total unique impressions you can serve. I think this is a completely optional targeting option. Try the ads with and without this.

Browser Types – I set this to get rid of any mobile traffic. Mobile traffic sucks on non-mobile offers.

Age – As I discovered before, there are actually a wide spread on the age of online bingo players. 18 and up is what I’m trying here. I track the ages of those clicking my ads by including the {age:} tag in my tracking links. This allows me to see where I’m getting the most clicks and where I’m getting the most conversions. You may want to break your ad groups down to groups of 5 ages at a time. This allows you to better tailor CPM rates for each group of ages, as you’ll find older traffic typically costs more.

Country – These are the countries where Bingo Cabin is allowed (Actually, I screwed up here. Bingo Cabin is allowed in CA, AU, and NZ, so disregard the image and target appropriately!). Create a seperate campaign for each country to better track CPMs and conversions. This is just an example.

Some other targeting options you might want to play with are income, ethnicity, ads clicked, profession and even maritial status. Remember though, that impressions on PoF are very limited, and the more you target down, the faster your campaigns will die to banner blindness. That and your revenue will be seriously cut.

So where else would I run this offer? Let’s try straight up media buys and banner display traffic. One of my favorite traffic sources is ExoClick. What’s great about them is that there is a lot of traffic to go around and you’ve got some great targeting options, as well as the ability to target bingo gambling sites directly.

You’ll first want to create a lot of different banners, first. Remember to create them in every IAB size and shape. 468 x 60, 728 x 90, 160 x 600, and 300 x 250 will be the most popular ad sizes. On the ads, make sure you’re preselling the offer as well as you can. Mention that they get their first $20 free with $0 deposit required. No credit card necessary is a huge benefit here. You can include images of previous winners and how much they won. Building a banner isn’t rocket science, nor is trying to sell this offer to those that probably already gamble online either. Google “bingo ad banners” and see what comes up. Try out enough of these general designs and you’re bound to find something. I usually won’t start a test without more than 25 different banners, and then I continually try out multiple banners with small adjustments to my best ads to optimize my ROI.

Target bingo sites under the Gambling subcategory on Exoclick. You can target wider if you’d like more traffic.

Assuming you are using the Exoclick tracking pixels, you will start seeing exactly where you are getting conversions. Create individual campaigns for each site that is converting (you can target by sites and keywords individually, which is a lovely feature about Exoclick). Assuming you have a high CTR ad, start bidding CPM to make sure you get consistent traffic on that site. Ads with low CTRs on CPC bidding won’t get much traffic longer than a day.

Final Comments

My only gripe on ExoClick is that you cannot exclude mobile traffic, however you can target just mobile traffic. I really wish that could be fixed, but I’m guessing that it probably makes them a lot of revenue. Anywho, I think I’ve left a good enough guide here to get you started. The PoF campaign is actually live right now, so I’ve only got a small head start. Right after publishing this, I’ll be off to Exoclick to see what I can do there! Jump on this offer before it really blows up!

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