I speak fluent french so we looked at offers in France and spoke with a few networks and Cupid Plc and decided to go with the Angedelamour.com offer (the Cupid.com for France). Cupid Plc has been growing well, so we took that as a good sign for their marketing funnel etc. We were disappointed by the results.
Facebook Stats
We split test some landing pages with different headlines / angles (all short length) and images to get:
Best LP: CTR 32% CR 0%
32 clicks sent to offer - No Conversions
POF Stats
We started with the suggested bid between 0.40-0.80. Got no impressions. After a back and forth with BenPOF, we realized the POF bidding recommendations are not adapted to France so suggested bids are irrelevant in that market.. There is also low inventory so need to bid higher. Updated the bid to 1.22. Much lower than this and you get hardly any impressions - Ben of POF suggested a number slightly lower than this e.g. 1.12. However at 1.22 we still got only a few hundreds impressions / day.
Ad CTR 0.24% - 0.56%
Landing Page (we used our based landing page from previous split test on facebook)
Volume: 14 clicks
CTR 78% CR 0%
So no conversions...
Lessons Learned
1. Work on offers active in the market already (people are running ads for a while, obviously making $$$). We did a separate test direct on angedelamour and got 1 lead conversion - but overall this offer just doesn't seem to convert (or they are shaving).
2. POF in France is really small and hardly seems worth it (especially if you have to do translations etc, even for us with fluent french it doesn't make sense). We got a lot more impressions on another campaign in Australia, as recommended by BenPOF. Ben also said that France is not a good location to start with POF.
3. Facebook dating traffic in france is much harder to get a decent CTR compared to our first campaign in Thailand (seems the members have already been hit for a long time with dating offers or it could be french skepticism playing a role?).
Questions/ Areas Need to Understand
1. Get better at selecting offers. Best approach? Ask the network? Spy on competition?
2. When running a direct link test of an offer, what is the cut off point for saying "go - no go" for investing time in a LP to improve ROI? E.g. if there are conversions, but hasn't yet achieved positive ROI? Hovering around a low ROI e.g. 20%?
Been hitting France for quite sometime and yes, I have to agree that it is much more difficult to get a decent CTR in this country.
Most ads that are performing really well for me on other countries, would not do well in France. Guess it's just because they do not have the targeting option "single/married/..." on Facebook? Or it's just their culture to not doing online dating?