Traffic Cardinal
wrote April 12, 2024
Traffic Cardinal
wrote April 12, 2024
Sweepstakes offers that provide an opportunity to win an expensive iPhone of the latest model are pricking at you from every corner of the Internet. Competition in the sweepstake vertical is quite high, so affiliates should contrive the right approach to sweeps and traffic attraction.
We decided to dedicate this article to sweepstakes affiliate marketing and all stuff related: let's talk about sweepstakes definition, offers, requirements and creatives you can employ in your campaign. So, shall we?
What Are Sweepstakes in Affiliate Marketing?
So, what’s a sweepstake? If you are looking for the sweepstakes definition in marketing terms, it’s a promo built on chance. Users toss in their contact info and maybe they win something. There is nothing to buy and no talent test to pass. The winner gets picked and that’s that. These offers tend to perform well – they are quick to launch and easy to promote, especially with a prize dangling in front.
Sweepstakes vs. Contests vs. Lotteries
Wondering how sweepstakes stack up against contests and lotteries? We just covered the sweepstakes meaning in marketing, so let’s look at what sets the other two apart.
Contests? You’ve got to earn it. Whether it’s a photo, essay or dance-off, entries are judged on merit instead of chance. The spotlight is on skill or creativity and winners rise to the top because they deserve it.
Lotteries are a pay-to-play game. You hand over cash (or something of value), and winners are drawn at random. Since they combine payment, prize and luck, lotteries are tightly regulated and usually land in the gambling zone.
Are Sweepstakes Legal? Key Rules to Know
Speaking of legal lines… Yes, sweepstakes are allowed in most regions. But only if you play by the rules! Here is how you can stay on the right side of the law:
You’ve got to say it: no purchase necessary. That phrase is what separates this kind of promo from something far more regulated. It’s definitely not what sweepstakes are about.
There has to be a free way in. That’s your AMOE – alternate means of entry. If joining means pulling out a credit card, you’ve already crossed the line.
Lay it all out – start date, end date, how winners are picked, how they’ll hear the news and when the prize shows up.
Going after US users? Then get familiar with the FTC and don’t sleep on state laws either. Other regions have their own rulebooks, so check before you launch.
Don’t play games with the odds or entry process. If you are hiding requirements, inflating chances or burying key info, then one: it’s shady, and two: it won’t hold up under scrutiny.
Why Run Sweepstakes Offers? (Main Advantages)
Sweepstakes are everywhere for a reason. A few reasons, actually:
Boost Engagement and Conversion
People love free stuff. Add a ticking clock and a chance to win – and you’ve got yourself instant FOMO. Besides, every entry is a lead you can chase later. Email lists, retargeting or whatever you’ve got in your bag.
Easy Entry, Low Barrier
It doesn't take much: just a name, maybe email, and voila – users are in the game. You'd expect more resistance, but there isn't any, haha! If you are an affiliate just getting started, it’s the easiest win you’ll find.
Viral and Scalable Potential
What are sweepstakes in marketing? Straight-up lead magnets, shareable by design. Tag a friend, post it to your story, refer five people for five extra chances – it can't but spread like wildfire. You set the bait, your audience does the rest.
Types of Sweepstakes Offers
What sweep stakes are legit? What do you actually consider a legit offer in the sweepstake niche? Well, there are a few types.
SOI (Single Opt-In) & DOI (Double Opt-In)
Single opt-in (SOI) implies a collection of data from the audience without confirmation. The simplest type of sweep with the lowest payment per lead.
Double opt-in (DOI) is the type of offer when data confirmation via email is required.
SOI and DOI offers are the simplest. They are suitable for absolutely any audience. For other sweeps, the requirements for the audience are higher: there are restrictions on gender, age, or ability to pay.
Credit Card Submit (CC Submit)
Credit Card Submit (CC-Submit) is one of the most expensive and complex sweeps since the user leaves his bank card details and sometimes pays a small amount of about $1-2. This is how subscriptions can be made at a reduced rate. At the end of the grace period, the user switches to the option with 100% payment.
Mobile Subscriptions / PIN Submits
In Interactive Voice Response (IVR), user data entered on the site is confirmed by voice through a call. Only a unique code is necessary for confirmation.
In PIN Submit, users leave phone numbers and confirm them via SMS. Subscription to newsletters or services is often used.
Top GEOs for Sweepstakes Traffic
In any vertical, competition in Tier-1 countries is always higher due to larger payouts, while Tier-2 and Tier-3 have lower returns per lead and are less saturated with offers, which makes the market less competitive and more accessible to beginners.
Tier 1 vs. Tier 2/3 GEOs
Users from Tier 1 are already familiar with sweepstakes meaning and willingly get involved. The best results for CC-Submit were shown by the Scandinavian and Baltic countries. France and Germany also showed good results. All countries are suitable for SOI and DOI, but the best indicators were in the USA, Canada, and the UK, as well as the southern part of Europe: Spain, Portugal, and Italy. The competition is very high.
Tier-2 countries work better with SOI and DOI. Warm-up for IVR, PIN, and CC requires better preparation. Eastern Europe can show a good conversion rate, especially in mobile traffic.
Tier-3 does not work well with CC-Submit, and in some countries, cards as a payment method are generally not widely used, so it is worth studying the specifics of each country. The rest of the sweeps work great here, especially mobile traffic, since it is more widespread than any other, particularly in India and Africa. They pay very little for Tier-3, but advertising can also be much cheaper.
Best Converting Countries in 2025
If we are being honest, tier 1 is tired. The real action in 2025 is happening in places most affiliates used to overlook. Latin America, Asia and Africa are stepping into the spotlight. Not because someone decided they are “emerging”. But because the numbers say so!
Brazil, India, Nigeria, Vietnam (once considered side markets) are now showing serious results. For many users, sweepstakes offers still feel new. So what does that mean? Right: their interest is genuine and clicks come easy. Add in native-language offers, mobile-first traffic and far less competition than the overfished Tier 1 pond… And just like that, you’ve got a recipe for success. Sure, payouts might be lower, but, in this case, volume wins.
Best Traffic Sources for Sweepstakes
Traffic for sweepstakes marketing can be found in almost any source, but we are eager to show you the most popular and effective ones.
Push & Popunder
Push notifications are one of the most profitable sources. Notifications with text and creative images allow you to attract attention and work with mobile and desktop traffic.
Popunders allow you to open a page with a giveaway and draw user attention to a valuable prize. They show good conversion on all platforms and are very popular in the vertical.
Social Traffic (Facebook, TikTok)
Native advertising on social media platforms helps you collect traffic through organically integrated creatives that increase trust. Choose sites that dwell on the topic: reviews of countries for travel and a giveaway for a tour can go well together. Success stories, compilations, and teasers work well.
Facebook prohibits niche advertising, therefore, knowledge of working with cloaking and account farming is required. You will have to constantly create new advertising accounts and launch advertising again.
SEO & Email Marketing
Search traffic allows you to gather an audience, luring people with the opportunity to get what they want for free or for a nominal fee, for example, in the case of subscriptions to movie sites.
Email newsletters are still an effective source for sweepstakes in marketing. Create a catchy headline and convince users of the profitability of the offer.
How to Create High-Converting Creatives
How to promote sweepstakes offers? Before developing creatives, use services that will show effective creatives from competitors. In sweepstake ads, creatives quickly bore the audience, although approaches in general live long. Let's have a look at several universal options.
Promoting the Prize: What Works
A simple approach in which we offer the user to receive a prize. Depict a gift, and the mystery from the understatement does the job. The picture should attract attention, and the text creo should contain a call to action: “Seize your prize!”
You often want to open incoming messages to get rid of the notification or not feel like you missed an opportunity. There are many options for this creative, from changing the message icon for popular messengers in GEO to photographs of the parcel or the illusion of a time limit: “Hurry to pick up your prize!”
Direct Offer Angles that Convert
Nothing stops you from inviting the user to participate in the giveaway, however, it is best to design creatives mentioning the possible prize and place them on relevant sources: smartphones on resources with reviews of smartphones, washing machines on pages about household appliances, and so on. This will significantly increase conversion.
Importance of Pre-Landers (Bridge Pages)
Whichever type of sweep offer you choose, you can always direct the audience to the advertiser’s page, but higher conversions can be obtained through pre-landing pages, which prepare users to leave their personal data with ease.
First, users must believe in the possibility of winning. They, at least, should understand why they were chosen as a participant. For example, if you work with search traffic and offer a subscription to a movie service for bank card data, where a person can watch a movie, you can directly inform them about this and resolve their doubts about possible attempts at fraud. For example, explain that the subscription can be canceled anytime (as a rule, this condition gets easily forgotten.)
Interactive elements that reinforce your creatives also work well, for example, allowing you to guess where the prize is:
A similar option works with the wheel of fortune, which can be shown in the creative. You can continue on the pre-lander. This technique converts many offers: spinning the wheel of fortune allows people to feel excitement and involvement in the process. A person can win a trinket in the wheel or gain access to a giveaway for a super prize, which they definitely receive. After that, users leave their data on the advertiser’s landing page.
Whether you should or should not work with pre-landers depends on the features of your offer, so you need to warm up the audience accordingly, especially in Tier-2 and Tier-3 countries where people do not often encounter sweepstakes or do not have access to certain payment tools. It may be relevant in CC-Submit with a subscription. Before choosing an approach, study the specifics of the GEO.
The landing page supplies the last user action that will count as a conversion, so the page must meet the following requirements:
load quickly on any platforms of the selected GEO;
viewed without interface problems on any screens and platforms;
the text remains readable (regardless of screen size).
Landing page texts are optimized to provide comprehensive answers to user requests and highlight the benefits of providing information. At the same time, lengthy messages are not welcome as people grow tired of long reads.
Affiliates use various techniques to build trust:
recognizable interface elements or color schemes from other companies to create a sense of connection between resources;
data connecting the client with the product by place of residence, telecom operator, and brand awareness.
CC Submit Prelanders for International Traffic
The affiliate wanted to test an unusual internationally oriented offer. The selected offer pertains to the CC-Submit category, where the advertiser paid $20 for each subscription. Among the available GEOs, there were 150 countries, the majority belonging to Tier-2 and Tier-3 regions. The affiliate did not remove any GEOs from the offer at the beginning of the campaign.
There were 2 landing pages available for work, with iPhone XS and Samsung S10. Traffic was purchased from the PropellerAds, a sweepstakes affiliate program. The affiliate noted they had difficulty passing the moderation, and as a result, after several iterations of communication with the moderators of the advertising network, they chose the pre-landing option with prize boxes. The user was invited to guess which box contained the prize.
The author of the case added that they did not localize the prelanding page by language, so the case contains many opportunities for optimizing the campaign.
The affiliate chose a popunder with SmartCPM as the advertising format. The campaign was carried out with RON traffic with automatic trading disabled, and the CPM was set at $1.8, divided into mobile and desktop traffic.
After the launch of the advertising campaign, within a few days, certain GEOs were cut off: this included the options where the number exceeded 1500 and conversions to clicks were below 2%. Every day, the bid for impressions increased by 25% to transfer more traffic to expensive countries. After a week, the affiliate identified the most converting countries and removed the ineffective ones.
Traffic analysis showed that effective traffic comes from French-speaking countries, so the affiliate translated the landing page into French and Spanish.
Based on the results of working with this offer, the affiliate spent $6,430, received $13,323 in revenue, and the net income was $6,893, i.e. the return on investment was 107%.
PIN-Submit Funnels for Localized Offers (e.g. Portugal)
The affiliate who presented this case was driving traffic to SOI offers through the Advidi software, but the traffic from push notifications did not pay off. Because of this, he decided to switch to PIN-Submit to get more payouts per lead. The new offer offered $11.
2 pre-landers and 8 banners were tested, some of which were taken with the help of spy services and modified independently.
The banner that withstood the tests:
The banner was accompanied by:
the headline: Win a certificate for 500 euros;
description: Take your certificate for 500 euros.
After seeing the banner, people went to the prelanding page, which tested best:
To drive traffic successfully, the affiliate initially used push notifications with the CPM payment method, but later switched to the CPC method.
In total, according to the company's results, $1,067 was spent, revenue was $2,541, and net profit was $1,474.
Compliance and Rules to Avoid Bans
Shiny prizes and viral reach might sound good, but if you don’t follow certain rules, you risk having your campaigns nuked mid-launch. Let’s find out how to stay in the good graces of both the law and the platforms that hold your ad fate in their hands.
No Purchase Necessary & Terms
If you charge people to enter, congrats – you’ve just invented a lottery. And that’s illegal in most places. Keep entry free, loud and clear. Your terms should be easy to find, easy to read and impossible to misinterpret. And yes, you must spell out how you handle user data: GDPR, CCPA… and basic human decency.
Ad Platform Guidelines
Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, Google, X – they all have their own guidelines. Break one rule and your sweepstakes ad could vanish faster than a disappearing story. So:
Use proper labels: “ad”, “sponsored” or whatever the platform demands.
Tagging friends = good. Forcing it = banned. Suggest, don’t demand. Sharing posts? Also a no-go. Platforms aren’t fans of sweepstakes that feel like chain letters.
Respect age and location limits – no contests for kids or restricted regions.
Be upfront about how winners are picked and when.
And don’t assume yesterday’s rules still apply. Platforms update policies like they change algorithms – constantly.
Final Tips and Strategy Summary
Even beginners can work with sweepstakes. Almost any GEO will be converted, and, as can be seen from the article, sweepstakes marketing examples in Tier 2 and Tier 3 are not demanding when it comes to the visual quality of creatives, so basic graphic knowledge will be enough to get started.
Many Tier 2 and 3 countries have a strong mobile bias, which can be used when choosing traffic sources. You shouldn’t start working with Tier 1 GEOs because of high competition; it’s better to enter these regions with experience in the vertical, and you can get your feet wet in lower-paying countries: the low conversion price can be made up for with the volume of cheap traffic.
FAQ
