Best artists, the most expensive TV ads, top athletes – yes, Super Bowl 2019 is just a few weeks away.
The audience expects entertainment, quality ads, and good humor. It’s not just words; according to Marketing Charts, 78.1% of the U.S. audience perceive Super Bowl (SB) ads primarily as entertainment.
What types of creatives, ad formats, verticals, and GEOs are the most profitable?
To help you out with setting up a profitable campaign for this year’s Super Bowl, our Analytics department has analyzed more than 120 campaigns, launched for Super Bowl 2018 (from January – February 2018).
Below you can find a comprehensive statistic, related to Super Bowl campaigns.
Clearly, stats by themselves don’t always reflect the best practices. That’s why we asked our Sales Team Lead, Andrey Veselov, to comment on the stats and help find winning combinations of creatives and settings for affiliate marketers and advertisers to use, while they are preparing their SB campaign materials.
GEOs
To begin with, we looked at GEOs our advertisers and affiliates targeted for their SB campaigns.
Although the leading GEOs were easy to predict, some locations came as a surprise. We sorted all GEOs into 3 groups, with the first group showing the highest financial results and top CTR.
The second group had average results, compared to the leaders, and the third one featured GEOs with the lowest engagement.
The U.S. was an absolute leader in terms of profit and conversion rate, which is expected because the major chunk of the audience watching American football competitions resides in the United States.
What Andrey says? “This is an interesting table. What you have to pay attention to is that all these countries belong to different tiers of traffic, so don’t add all these GEOs to one campaign.
Also, the conversion rate will depend on how popular American football is in a particular country. As I can see, our table is quite accurate in this aspect.”
Campaign Duration
How long before the event were campaigns launched? In this part, we compared the percentage of “early” VS. “late” campaigns.
What Andrey says? “Although it heavily depends on the marketing budget, our clients tend to launch event-targeted campaigns a week or few days before the event. I can say that most of the betting companies go for the “3 days before” option.
In my opinion, 1 month before is a way too long time that can’t bring obvious benefits, even in terms of awareness – you are just spreading the budget too much.
On the other hand, the closer the event, the more competition for traffic – so the prices go higher.”
Top Verticals
While it’s clear that betting offers are among the most popular during the Super Bowl, other verticals were coming to the front, mainly due to complicated betting legislation in the U.S.
These are the verticals that worked best:
- iGaming (not in the U.S.)
- Streaming / Entertainment
- Nutra
- Email submits (aka surveys)
- Sweepstakes
- eCommerce (merchandise)
As you can see, not all these verticals are directly connected to sports events. Yet our advertisers and affiliates used Super Bowl (or American football)-themed campaigns to promote their offers.
What Andrey says? “The general trend during all kinds of sporting events is that the audience is becoming more responsive to ads and more willing to buy. This effect spreads to the majority of verticals.
There is a strong response in Betting (not the U.S.), streaming, and eCommerce – various merchandise offers perform well.”
Ad Formats and Devices
What ad formats were the most popular during Super Bowl?
What Andrey says? “Push traffic is super-hot right now. This format is perfect for event-targeted campaigns. We all know that the audience is mainly on their mobile devices, so messages sent at the right time have a good chance to convert users.”
Creatives
Our affiliates used the following creatives for their Super Bowl campaigns:
What increased the CTR?
- Athlete close-ups (+7% CTR)
- Stadium view (+2% CTR)
- People celebrating (+ 11% CTR)
Landing page example (from AffBank):
What Andrey says? “In my experience, the conversion rate is higher if you use creatives that are thematically close to the topic of the event you target. The best strategy here is to tweak your best-performing creatives a little and leave all the rest settings untouched.”
Offer Examples
What’s on Affbank now:
Some offers from OfferVault:
+ Laws and Copyright
What should you remember, while preparing creatives for your Super Bowl campaign?
- Laws
If you are promoting a betting offer, make sure your promo is compliant with the laws in your target locations. That will really help you avoid multiple troubles. And we all know that legal issues are expensive.
Read more:
Online Sweepstakes: Keeping Your Promotions Legal
US Sports Betting Affiliates: What’s Going to Change?
Staying on the Legal Side: Misleading Ads & Regulations Around the Globe
- Copyright
As with the Olympics and Football World Cup, organizers of the Super Bowl are protecting their intellectual rights (and profits). Therefore, you are not allowed to use the words “Super Bowl,” or “Super Sunday.” And logos – be careful with logos.
We strongly recommend reading this article; the authors suggest multiple ways to go around these prohibitions and still make people understand what it is all about.
We really hope this article would help you create a super-converting Super Bowl campaign 🙂
Meanwhile, join us to discuss this topic (or any other) on our Telegram Chat.
