How a media buyer can get maximum profit with upcoming holidays on Sweepstakes

The end of fall and up till mid January is the time when people are eager to spend money on themselves and their loved ones. And businesses are more than happy to give them this opportunity with big bonuses and different gifts. Which makes this time perfect for both advertisers and publishers.

But it’s also important to use this moment and make the most profit out of it. In this article we’ll share the experience of the Zeydoo media buying team and a case from one of our partners to show how you can do it too.

P.S. And if you’ve never worked with Sweepstakes, below you’ll find a guide on how to start working with the vertical 💫

Which holidays and events help you earn now

At the moment the most popular approach among our partners is a ‘holiday approach’. This is what you can start working with now (in Sweepstakes, but this approach can be used for other verticals as well):

• October 31st — Halloween. Anything that you can find: from Coca-Cola offers to home decor. The holiday itself can inspire new and optimized creatives to grab the attention of potential customers.
• November 10-16th — Mexican Black Friday (Buen Fin). iPhones, Samsung and any other expensive gadgets.
• November 11th — Black Friday. Any good devices, Amazon vouchers etc.

• November 24th — Thanksgiving day in the US.
• November 20th – December — Football World Cup. Time for big screens that won’t let you miss any move on the field.
• December 25th — Christmas in Europe and the States. You can start as early as the beginning of December with no limitations on types of offers.

The list is not complete, obviously. For each GEO and culture you can find dozens of local holidays (that are easily googleable).

The idea is not in the holidays per se, but in the approaches. If you follow the world news, you’ll be able to create an ad for any occasion. Here are some examples of what we worked with when everyone else was using the same old methods:

• gas coupons when gas prices soared;
• toilet paper and streaming services during the pandemic;
• iPhones in September (though are popular all year round);
• Black Friday in November (btw, can be found in different countries in odd months under different names), etc.

Here is some real story from our media buyer:

A pre-lander is a must-have for sweepstakes offers. We usually use Wheels of Fortune or prize boxes, but we had some cases of working with social traffic where we gave some motivational stories.

For example, when a new iPhone was released, we called for ‘Old models clearance! Get an iPhone for just $1!’. We created a pre-landing page where we said there had been a crash of a cargo ship that was transporting new models. They managed to save several containers, but since they are up for being written off, we decided to give them away.

In other words, you can earn with anything you want, but don’t forget about the context: local events, economic situation in the region, new trends of Gen Z and so on. To illustrate this idea, we’ll present a case from our partner. We’ve kept it for this exact moment to show how effective it can be to use national holidays😏

Case for $910: sweepstakes during holiday season with 59,55% ROI

• Offer: 4013 Buen Fin MX pop
• Vertical: Sweepstakes
• GEO: MX
• Traffic source: Pop
• Leads: 3642
• Expenses: $934,32
• Earnings: $1845,20
• Profit: $910,28
• Profit from additional monetization: $463.84
• СR: 3.28%
• ROI: 59.55%
• Time period: 01.11-30.11.2021

Campaign settings and flow

This time I went to Zeydoo to find a sweepstakes offer specifically designed for Buen Fin (‘good weekend’). It is a big-scale national event in Mexico, the so-called Mexican Black Friday. And I had to target just one GEO with one language.

For this campaign I decided to use one creative and a quite typical but still effective landing page for Sweepstakes that was translated into Spanish:

Landing: Get the best deal at Buen Fin 2021! Don’t miss the opportunity to save money! 

I still, however, divided the campaign into Desktop and Mobile. The Desktop campaign didn’t show great results. Once I saw negative ROI and no profit, I turned it off immediately. The mobile was way better: profit was close to zero, but the CR at 1,86% made me hopeful. And showed me that I needed to optimize it.

To make the CR higher, I added additional targeting for Android users. It worked, the parameter grew up to 3,29%. Besides, in the first two weeks (01.11 – 13.11) the advertiser gave me a rate bump. He didn’t have any concerns: 1000 conversions showed the traffic was good.

To this campaign I added two more things:

• Smart Tag from ProPush.me. With this my landing page started showing the option to subscribe to push-notifications. The idea behind it was that users will subscribe and start getting push-notifications – and ProPush.me will pay me for the subscribers. This simple step allows you to compensate for test expenses (especially, if your offer doesn’t bring many conversions) and secure some additional income with little effort.
• TrafficBack link. TrafficBack helped monetize the rest of irrelevant traffic. The principle of work is simple: a user goes to your offer’s page, doesn’t see anything interesting and doesn’t subscribe to push-notifications. Then they press on ‘Back’ in the browser to exit the page. But this will redirect them to the SmartLink with a more suitable offer. You can ask Zeydoo for a SmartLink.

It worked well: the campaign started showing profit.

When Buen Fin finally started, it skyrocketed my profit! The event was held from November 10th till 16th which was the most profitable period of the whole campaign (and it continued this way up till November 18th – the offer was giving me money even after the holiday was over).

Final results of the Buen Fin campaign are here:

With the additional monetization I earned $463! This is almost half of the cost of the campaign, thanks to ProPush and SmartLink!

What to work with right now

If you opt for a holiday-based approach for the offers, don’t forget to ask your manager to give you the relevant list of offers for the upcoming events. The world and Zeydoo are not standing still!

This is what works well with us:

• 6884 DE – Lidl + eBike. SOI-offer with $3.06 for each registration. Facebook now shows the best results. You can always work with adult traffic.

• 7016 IT – iPhone 14 Direct. Another SOI-offer. $2.64 for a registration. Test cap – 50 conversions. After a traffic check – unlimited.

• 6372 UK – Aldi E-bike. SOI, $2.00 for each registration. Cap – 50 conversions.

• 5899 BR – BIG TESTER – CPL. Offer with an interesting flow: register on Big Tester and get free products to test at home AND get a chance to win an iPhone. $0.28 for a registration.

To look at statistics and see other offers you can go to @IvchenkoAnna. And now let’s have a look at the sweepstakes funnel and talk about how to work with the vertical if you’re a newbie.

Working with Sweepstakes if you’re a newbie

This is exactly the time to start with traffic!

• If you’ve ever worked with Zeydoo – it’s time to start driving traffic to our offers again! We’ll give you +20% to your first withdrawal. 
• Everyone who has been bringing more than $5,000 for a month, we’ll add $300 to the payout, if it’s $10,000 – +$700. If you send more than $10,000, we can offer you a more personalized reward.
• Before the New Year our TOP 3 partners that bring the most traffic will get prizes (Playstation 5, iPhone etc.)  

* The offer is standing till the end of December: message our manager to start earning now and get more than $2000 to your balance. We’ll be posting more information about each holiday on our social media: approaches, offers, creatives, GEOs etc. – don’t forget to subscribe to never miss a thing. This week we’ll be talking about Halloween 🎃 The links to our social media will be at the end of the article.

We’ve already covered the approach that can help you earn money. Now let’s see how we can work with the vertical in general. A funnel in Sweepstakes basically consists of the offer, traffic source, creative, pre-lander and a landing page from the advertiser. Here is a quick overview of all the steps and what advice our media buying can give you.

Offer and GEO: how to choose and what to pay attention to 

Let’s start with the offer, shall we? A good offer will get you halfway to success. Our managers launch only the best offers on the market, but you still need to be able to evaluate the offer based on this criteria:

• User’s interest in the product. If we talk about push/pop traffic, targeting is not particularly good there (except for language, browser and OS). You need to understand that a scooter giveaway in the US (where they value personal cars more than anything) will not be the same as an iPhone or an Amazon voucher giveaway. And it might not bring you the same results as in other countries, for instance.
• Payout model. If it’s SOI/DOI, you have fewer chances of a user to get off the ‘hook’ than in CC submit (people are not really willing to leave their card info on unknown resources). There are also countries where online card payments are not really widespread. 
• Your type of traffic in this GEO. For example, our media buying has some main traffic sources – push/pop notifications in PropellerAds, Adsterra, Galaksion, Clickadu. TikTok and doorway pages also perform well. We work with both desktop and mobile traffic, but mobile converts better. While choosing an offer we definitely try to assess how much of potential traffic we can expect in this GEO.

Sweeps also convert well with Facebook, similar approaches are used. If you need accounts for setup and sweep outflows without microspends, please contact the MakeMoney TEAM shop.

Here is a thought that we’ve been highlighting throughout this whole article: Sweepstakes is a vertical with giveaways and gifts which means it’s better to promote it with a special emphasis on some upcoming event.
Well, except for the gas vouchers.

Creatives: where to find them and how to create them

Now that we know what offer we want to work with, it’s time to get creative (we mean, creatives). The best way to get inspired are spy tools. You might think that most publishers don’t really care about making their creatives artistic (which is true), but in reality – the simpler the message is, the better.

Since we have constant traffic from push/pop and Tiktok, we decided to see what creatives publishers use with these sources. Having surfed through hundreds of adult and casino banners, we’ve found some good creatives with texts.

Classics:

A cool approach right here:

Advice from media buying: if you plan on starting traffic with sweepstakes, get yourself a text document and save all the phrases in different languages. They will prove useful in the future.

TikTok videos are more interesting. Here we either film them ourselves (which is faster) or look for donors on TikTok or make montages of unpacking/deliveries/wins from YouTube. The main rule here is that it should evoke emotions. Here are some examples from TikTok donors:

To search for creatives you can use these hashtags:  #winneriphone #amazonvoucher #giveaway #coupons and their variations.

NB: before making a creative/pre-lander think about what would get you interested in the giveaway? Be creative, think outside the box. Test some pictures, videos that might interest different users: men/women, people older or younger. Sweepstakes are perfect for this because tests won’t be expensive.

Pre-lander: to use or not to use and where to find them

We all know nothing is truly free in life, so one creative won’t solve the problem. We need a pre-lander, a page with a motivating story or with some interactive game/survey/… that will get the user to make the target action.

Pre-lander can be different: prize boxes, Wheels of Fortune, surveys, storytelling. If you want to see what it should look like and where to find them, go again to any spy service. Here are some examples from a fifteen minute search:

Resume

It does look like sweepstakes don’t have many pitfalls, which might be true compared with other verticals. However, seasoned media buyers can get maximum from their traffic in Sweepstakes thanks to their experience, intuition and ready-made lifehacks.

Our message in a nutshell: think everything through, get more creative, use ‘holiday/events approach’. And get your high ROI.

That’s it! Go to Zeydoo and subscribe to our social media – we’ll be posting more useful content✌️

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