Sweepstakes Case Study: 96% ROI

Traffic source: TikTok Ads

Affiliate network: ClickDealer

GEO: DE

Vertical: Sweepstakes

Campaign time period: 01.03.2020 to 10.04.2021

Spent: $1493

Earned: $2927

Profit: $1434

ROI: 96%

Choice of vertical and offers

I have a background in running sweepstakes on push traffic, so my choice of vertical wasn’t entirely random. I’d heard that sweepstakes work great on TikTok Ads, so I assumed I could profit or at least break even. I decided it would be faster to test something with a fast flow like SOI, and went with smartphone offers, because I already had a few ideas for creatives and some prelanders ready to go. ClickDealer has plenty of sweepstakes to choose from, so after a bit of research in the platform, I had to get a second opinion from my account manager. They were happy to help out, and I ended up choosing a DE offer with a decent payout for SOI.

Getting accounts

I ran most of the campaign on prepaid self-registered accounts. Didn’t have to buy any, because it was easier to just create them on your own. Used a single payment method: wire transfer from a Russian bank card. Back then, you could simply re-up TikTok Ads accounts from Russian cards, but now that a certain security update has come through, trying to recharge your account directly gets you banned.

Moderation and bans

Getting creatives approved was easy (see examples below), and even when I’d get a rejection, that was easily rectified by cloning the ad set (nowadays that gets you banned). Accounts would last for anywhere from $10 to $100 ad spend, and I couldn’t find any kind of consistent pattern in that regard. In all likelihood, most of the bans were for cloaking and prelanders, because sooner or later that got spotted by the system. Regardless, I would still advise to cloak, just to save yourself the trouble with moderation. You could still get through with a bit of effort, but it will take some creativity.

Prelanders

In 99% of the cases, sweepstakes work poorly without prelanders, because users need to be warmed up before leaving any kind of data on the landing page. Where do you get prelanders? Here’s a hint: you can spot a few of them looking for push campaigns in spy tools and edit in anything you need. Here are some examples of what you can find:

At first, I set up a pixel and optimized based on button clicks, using the event called Button Click in TikTok Ads, and switched up to optimizing based on registrations when the advertiser added a TikTok pixel to the offer. My ROI jumped up at that point, because I started getting better traffic from the platform.

Ad creatives

My strategy for making ad creatives was simple: get a few videos featuring the needed device from YouTube or Instagram, then edit in music and a voiceover. There are plenty of services where you can get either text-to-speech audio or an actual voiceover pretty cheap. As for the script, keep it simple:

Examples:

Conclusion

As you can see, SOI offers can get you quite a decent ROI, and I’m sure you can push it even farther with sweepstakes. There are tons of traffic in TikTok, and its audience grows with each passing day, giving you that many more opportunities to advertise. Working with TikTok Ads presents its own set of challenges, and right now it’s mostly about payments, bans, and rejections. It has become harder to run any kind of campaigns on self-registered accounts, let alone sweepstakes, but having access to such a massive audience is enough motivation to keep looking for new ways to make it happen.