Sweepstakes 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 and all stuff related: let's talk about offers, requirements, and creatives you can employ in your campaign. So, shall we?..
Sweepstakes What Is It
Obviously, you came here to clarify the ever-present query sweepstakes what it means and what sweepstakes meaning, and we are only willing to share our knowledge.
Sweepstakes include offers whose essence is to attract the audience to sweepstakes and quizzes. Users get the opportunity to participate in a giveaway for valuable prizes, and in exchange, they leave their personal data and sometimes take personal opinion surveys.
The audience is motivated to participate, and virtually no investment is required from people other than spending a small amount of time or a nominal fee. Due to favorable conditions and the opportunity to win prizes, the conversion rate in the sweep vertical is significantly higher than in any other.
Advantages
All participants can benefit from sweepstake offers, sometimes even more than it might seem at first glance:
- Advertisers receive impressive coverage for the brand, hot leads, and a customer base with data for work or subsequent sales.
- Affiliates can get conversions easily and spend less money on advertising campaigns. Additionally, affiliates can obtain a database of phone numbers or email addresses.
- Users can win a valuable prize without extra investment. In addition to prizes, people can get lucrative offers that save money or eliminate pain points.
Sweepstake Types
What sweepstakes are legit? What do you actually consider a legit offer in the sweepstake niche? Well, there are a few types.
Offers of the sweepstake vertical are distinguished by the requirements for information that is collected from users. Thus, the niche can be divided into 5 types:
- 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.
- In PIN Submit, users leave phone numbers and confirm them via SMS. Subscription to newsletters or services is often used.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
GEO
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.
- Users from Tier 1 are already familiar with sweeps 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.
Traffic Sources
Traffic for sweeps can be found in almost any source, but we are eager to show you the most popular and effective ones.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Native advertising 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.
- Email newsletters are still an effective source in sweeps. Create a catchy headline and convince users of the profitability of the offer.
- 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.
Creatives
How to promote sweepstakes offers? Before developing creatives, use services that will show effective creatives from competitors. In sweepstakes, creatives quickly bore the audience, although approaches in general live long. Let's have a look at several universal options.
Surprise
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!”
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
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.
Pre-Landing
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.
Landing
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.
Relevant Cases
Let's examine a few examples of working in a vertical to make things clear.
CC Submit & 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, ad network for sweepstakes offers. 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 for 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.
Wrapping Up
Even beginners can work with sweepstakes. Almost any GEO will be converted, and, as can be seen from the article, sweeps 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
