Can you even imagine now — still in this millennium, we used to meet dates in bars and through friends. But time goes on, and now it’s all about swipe right, swipe left. Still, the human appetite for romance (or anything remotely related) has not dwindled. This means that the dating vertical is (and will remain) a gold mine for affiliate marketing. Dating may not be as essential as food or clothes, but it follows close behind. Hooking up in bars is archaic, remember?
Sure, everyone understands that a dating vertical affiliate program can be an all-year-round source of revenue. The number of possible affiliate payout options, traffic sources, and advertising platforms alone is already confusing. So, it’s important to choose reliable affiliate partners that offer flexible dating offers and can guarantee good monetization. Not to bury the lead, AdsEmpire is such a network with exclusive dating offers in top-tier countries and multiple payout models. But first things first — what are the top dating traffic sources, and how do you monetize them through affiliate marketing?
Top Dating Traffic Sources
Without quality traffic, affiliate marketing is useless. It does not matter if you get paid for a lead (someone who registers on a dating site) or a sale (someone who pays for a paid subscription), you need as much traffic as you can get to boost your monetization chances.
In the dating vertical, the best traffic types for dating offers are:
Reviews
Nothing beats a good, honest dating site review. And it does not matter if the site is mainstream (let’s live happily ever after) or adult (no comment). The adult dating sites, ironically, are the hardest to monetize through affiliate marketing because Google is so sensitive about nudity these days. But it’s possible because the demand is not decreasing, and people are still looking for quality reviews that would redirect them to quality adult sites.
Google PPC Ads
Google pay-per-click ad campaigns are the quickest way to drive traffic. But, obviously, they only work for mainstream dating offers. Plus, the success of a PPC campaign depends on keyword targeting and location settings. Simply put, there are limitations even with the best dating offers.
Search Engine Optimization
SEO is a long-haul game that needs constant work, but the rewards are well worth it. Quality SEO that monetizes dating traffic is about regular content creation, cross-posting, backlinking — tons of work, even when dealing with top dating offers that are already popular. And it takes time before it starts paying off, so relying on SEO alone is like looking for a unicorn in a fairyland. No, of course, it (SEO) exists. It just cannot exist alone.
Social Media
Driving traffic from social media is a topic for a whole e-book. Or five. TikTok, Facebook, Instagram — pretty much any social site besides LinkedIn (and with some imagination, maybe even LinkedIn) — can become an excellent source for driving dating traffic. The trick here is to understand the dating site’s target audience and the social platforms this audience uses. In practice, managing the social media jungle is a 24/7 job for professional SMM experts and affiliate marketers.
In-App Advertising
Everyone uses mobile apps, and we do our best to stick to their free versions. And free versions come with ads — ads that can also become good sources of dating traffic. But here, it’s important to target the app (can’t advertise an adult dating site on the Catholic Digest Magazine) and the ad content to catch the user’s attention. Because —come on — we all try to look away and do something else when an in-app ad is running.
These are only some top examples of traffic sources for dating offers, and they all come with strings attached. It’s important to understand which dating offers are best suited to different dating traffic sources. When you start scaling your affiliate marketing, you will need help to monitor and analyze these campaigns — something a trained support in AdsEmpire is happy to do.
How Do You Monetize Dating Traffic?
Lots of traffic does not mean lots of money. There is a correlation, but it’s not that direct. Even if users click on your links and go to your landing pages, that does not mean they will subscribe to the dating site — to say nothing about paying for a premium membership.
So, how do you make people stay? That is, how do you monetize your affiliate marketing efforts? Here are a few ideas.
Target, target, target
You can’t advertise adult content in educational apps for toddlers, just like you can’t go to TikTok with a 50+ dating site ad. It’s all about targeting and understanding your audience’s needs.
Think about the unique selling point of a dating site — even seemingly mainstream ones have those. It’s about how to choose dating offers — or how users choose them. Some are for meeting Asian beauties, some are for teens, some are for seniors, there are sites for Christian, Jewish, Muslim communities, and so on.
The more you narrow down, the easier it gets to choose the right combo of a dating offer and a suitable traffic source.
Combine different traffic sources
The same mainstream dating sites can offer something to different audience groups. So, it helps to combine different traffic sources even when advertising the same site. Obviously, you should adjust the ad formats and CTAs, too. But that’s all about targeting. More precisely, it’s about offering people something they might like.
Know your devices
It’s funny, but dating sites (that almost killed old-school offline dating) remain very old-fashioned when devices are concerned. More than half of dating traffic comes from desktop — an astonishing number in today’s mobile swiping world. But mobile is not giving up — it’s almost half of all dating traffic. It’s the tablet that remains totally ignored, with only 5% of people using it for dating purposes. So, optimize your campaigns and landing pages for either mobile or desktop (and target!).
Use brand colors when possible
Color is a major factor influencing marketing success — and it’s one of the few remaining tricks that savvy tech users do not perceive as a trick. Playing along with brand colors helps you subconsciously prepare users for conversion. You do not always need to make a sweet matching couple of your redirect and landing pages. But if the landing site is a pink-and-gold theme, the redirect page cannot be white-and-blue — that’s just cognitive dissonance for the user. At least make the color themes on both pages similar to ensure a smooth transition. And possibly conversion!
Quality Traffic + Quality Offers = Conversion
High conversion is the golden goose of affiliate marketing. And you can’t catch this goose without quality dating traffic and quality dating offers. It’s all about carefully targeting your audience, figuring out the messages and CTAs that work for them, choosing quality channels, and regular result monitoring. But affiliate marketing does not have to be boring — there is room for creativity and experimentation, which can be real fun. There is math in it, too, and plenty of time-consuming analytics. Still, with the right partners, this process can be streamlined to ensure high conversion rates and good monetization.
And the irony of it all is that successful affiliate marketing is not just about successful affiliation with the brands and promoting their products. It is also about successful affiliation with advertising parties because they help sky-rocket your creative efforts with high converting dating offers. And AdsEmpire is always ready to collaborate with anyone who wants to boost their marketing revenue with high-converting dating offers.
