I have a solid background in Forex and binary options. I used to make good money on these offers, but now it doesn’t look profitable anymore (regulators cracking down?), so I decided to dive into microloans.

I’m not a big fan of expensive GEOs (like tier-1), I prefer Latin America and Europe. So when I ran into this yummy CPA offer at Toro, targeting Mexico, I decided to test it. By the way, I was curious to try those popular push notifications.

Here’s the T&C:

Why push notifications? I felt like I was literally hearing about it all the time, and I thought to give it a go. Why PropellerAds? Last winter at the Moscow MAC conference I met guys from Propeller and they were very complimentary about push notifications, saying that it’s the best format for a finance niche.

Campaigns

First of all, I had to find my target audience. From my experience with Forex, I knew that they were students and family people living the paycheck-to-paycheck lifestyle. That’s the key reason why I avoided pics with busty girls in my creatives. So all the images were plain and simple – money and bright abstract image, provided by the CPA network.

Landing page (also provided by Toro):

It’s very positive and without any hints, as you can see.

First, I launched two campaigns, targeting mobile (Android) and desktop (Windows) users. The push creatives were pretty simple (i.e., without big banners), I chose CPC bidding, frequency capping was set to 1/24, and activity targeting was set to “High.”

As the ad network says, the highest CTR and conversions are in “high” group.

Bid – $0.006 per click

The goal was to test this “creme de la creme” audience. If it didn’t work well here, it wouldn’t work with other activity targeting groups.

The ad copy was super simple:

Title: Necesita efectivo hoy? / “Need cash today?”

Description: Solicite ahora y obten ga hasta $3000/ “Apply now and get up to $3000”

There were some mistakes in the message (copy-pasting went wrong haha). But even with that gaffe, the message was converting so well.

Sure thing, everything was in Spanish. A lot of Mexicans speak English, but they’ll trust more if they see their native language.

Spanish with its variety of dialects made things more difficult for me. So there’s a simple rule of thumb: if you target Spanish audience, look for native speakers from that exact location. At Upwork.com I’ve found a cheap freelance translator from Mexico. He made few translations English-to-Spanish just for $4. Profit.

Here’s how my push notifications for Android-users looked like:

I tracked conversions on my Propeller dashboard via postback. Decided not to bother with trackers (by that moment my Voluum subscription was also expired).

For desktop (the second campaign) I used push notifications with a banner from the ad network.

Here it is:

The ad copy for push notifications remained the same, but for banners, I used this (provided by the CPA network):

– Prestamo instantaneo hasta $3000 / “Instant credit up to $3000”

– CTA: Consigue / “Get”

– Gratis / And the was a magic word “free” just below the amount.

I ran this campaign with the same frequency capping set to 1/24 and activity targeting “High.” CPC – $0.004.

Limits for every campaign were: $15 (for 24 hours), and $150 in total.

Optimization

Here’s are the stats after the two-week period:

As expected, the CTR for the desktop campaign with banners was twice as high, but the amount of traffic was much lower. ROI was excellent (spent – $147, profit – $383.08, according to the CPA stats), but still I wanted to increase the volume of traffic.

I decided not to make any changes in the running campaigns, as an old sysadmin proverb says, “If It works, don’t touch it.”

By the way, you can’t change activity targeting in active campaigns (and it’s even better, it’s easier to compare test results for different audiences).

So, I launched an Android campaign. I chose mobile targeting, as the traffic estimator suggested the were big traffic volumes there.

Ad settings and creatives were all the same as in the first campaign, but I set activity targeting to “Low.” Since I pay only for actual clicks, the warning of a possibly low CTR couldn’t scare me off: conversion rate is what matters.

Here’s what I got in the end:

The CTR of the second Android campaign (for “Low” audience) was 5 times lower compared to “High” audience, but conversions were at the same level. Although CR was lower, ROI was even higher because of the lower CPC. (70 conversions per $1.60, CPA = $112, in spite of the fact that I spent $32 on the campaign).

It turns out that the campaign I haven’t been expecting to perform well appeared to be the most profitable.

Eventually, I left all 3 campaigns active as there was no audience overlap.

Screenshot from Toro Advertising:

Total clicks: 122,658

Traffic costs: $621

Conversions: 810 (CTA stats)

Payout: $1,512.05

Net profit: $891,05

Key takeaways

I should’ve been more careful with activity targeting, that’s a cool feature, but think twice when you use it (I didn’t have any plan from the outset and chose settings guided by my curiosity). Now I want to test every single group and see the results.
I’ll try to figure out how the bids affect the traffic. Actually, I’ve used average values, but there’s a potential for further ROI improvement.
I’ll test different ad creatives.
I will certainly learn more about microloans, cause these offers convert better Forex and binary options.
I’ll test other verticals as well (e-commerce and nutrition).
And will definitely launch push notifications with banners (on mobile as well) – it really works and helps get more traffic.

And yes, hope to go to Mexico 🙂

Congratulations to Viktor Timofeev, the author of this case, who won the Summer contest from PropellerAds! He’s one of the top-3 winners and his reward is 100% return of the budget spent.

Disclaimer: Please note that this case was provided by one of our clients, and the views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of PropellerAds.