Campaign #1 - Thai Dating for Expats in Thailand (7)
BangkokBaby Campaign #1 - Thai Dating for Expats in Thailand (Facebook, Adwords)
This was our first paid traffic test (we own some authority sites that work based on organic traffic). We looked at the Thai dating market and found that the sites were pretty crappy with one that stands out - ThaiLoveLinks. Living in Thailand we're also aware of the difficulties foreign men have finding 'good' women that they can have serious relationships with.
So finding a serious partner was the angle, and we targeted expats/tourists. We tried this on both Facebook and google adwords in Thailand. We ran this direct with Cupid Media (company that owns thailovelinks, not to be confused with Cupid PLC)
Facebook Stats
We got our CPC down to $0.04 - 0.05.
1st Landing Page Split Test (Variations of short landing pages with different headlines/ angles)
Best LP: CTR 18.67% CR 0.36%
2nd Landing Page Split Test (Short landing page vs. long landing page)
Best LP (long landing page including detailed review): CTR 15.92% / CR 0.2% (beat winner from 1st LP split test whose stats had declined)
Campaign was profitable, ROI dropped over time - the small size of market targeted meant that reach was getting exhausted after around a week and profit was small.
Google PPC Stats
Best LP: CTR 16.67% CR 0.0%
Lessons Learned (might be the wrong lessons, so feedback welcome)
1. Work on a CPL based offer to start with, not a CPS, because CPL gets you more data / quicker.
2. Don't focus on the best quality product/ service - focus on the 'Best Offer' (if you can get both together, better, but offer comes first)
3. Work with proactive affiliate networks that are interested in the value you bring. We didn't get much help from Cupid Media and they are not very interested in their affiliates. They basically told us that they were successful running their own campaigns and didn't really care.
Questions/ Areas Need to Understand
1. What is a typical benchmark or range for a dating site's conversion from lead to sale? and from offer landing page to lead?
2. What is a good CR to aim for dating site offers sales?
3. Nature of Facebook traffic: As you push further into Facebook Reach (people who log on less often/ less engaged on platform) and higher frequency of views (finally click on ad because they see it all time) --> quality of leads declines?
4. Is is worth it to do such a targeted campaign to start with? We did it because we see a lot of advice to go international and to be very targeted. However since the reach is limited, and it is exhausted after a few days, it seems like a lot of time invested to get a meager result in profits even in the best-case scenario.
How did you target expats on Facebook? I had wanted to try that, but couldn't think of a way to do it.
Are you sure you're reaching all the expats? I don't know how you're targeting expats, so just wondering if there's some way to cast a wider net.
I think the obvious next step would be to try to target expats in other countries. I've heard of people doing that in the US just by targeting language. So, Turkish dating, Korean dating, etc.
In answer to your no. 4--this is such a small universe of people (how many expats are there in Thailand, 100,000? in comparison, Ireland has 3-4 million people and often ignored in AM because it's so small). This goes way beyond focused.
We just targeted people in Thailand who spoke English. Not very precise of course but that's the only thing that worked - the demo was already small, so targeting by interests (schools etc) to narrow it down to "just expats" (leaving out the thai males who speak English) wouldn't have been worth it.
Originally Posted by bangkokbaby
Pretty cool. I lived in Bangkok last year and know plenty of people that used the site.
Problem with a campaign like this is the reach of the campaign's just way too small which means low potential for volume. The amount of work you can put into a $100 a day campaign and a $1k a day campaign is almost the same: the difference is how broad of an appeal the campaign has.
There's a lot of great opportunities in International...but it typically means targeting the Thais themselves and finding an offer that appeals to them.
For more traffic perhaps you could do a buy with Thaivisa.com, they're the biggest expat community for Thailand.
Sorry for a distracting circlejerk post, but it's awesome to see you on STM, dr_ngo! You're a huge inspiration of mine.
Yeah good point dr_ngo. It was a good learning exercise but also a good reminder that small demos don't get you very far...
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