How Understanding Dating Product Monetization Models Increases Your Revenue: Tips from Cpamatica

If you work in affiliate marketing, it's important to understand how the industry operates from multiple angles. In today's article, experts from Cpamatica have prepared tips for affiliates that will help you gain a deeper understanding of products and advertisers — and ultimately increase your revenue. These skills are equally valuable for those working through an affiliate network and for affiliates who work directly with advertisers.

Cpamatica is an affiliate network for ambitious affiliates. Cpamatica has been operating in CPA marketing for over 10 years and works with the industry's top advertisers.

The affiliate network provides access to 1,000+ offers across Mainstream and Casual Dating, Games, and Cams verticals, including in-house and white label offers for various GEOs. The team provides proprietary optimization tools, personalized manager support, weekly payouts, and a unique loyalty program. 

Cpamatica's webmaster dashboard features a top offers panel with average EPC and CR data updated daily. This way, you'll always know which offers are the most popular and profitable in the network.

This article covers the following topics:

• Monetization types in dating products and why it matters
• How do advertisers evaluate affiliate traffic?
• How can an affiliate build long-term relationships with a network/advertiser?

Monetization Types in Dating Products 

Depending on a product's monetization type, as an affiliate you can understand what kind of traffic an advertiser needs and in what volumes.

There are generally 4 main monetization types:

1. Click Monetization — sites built in the form of a dating site members area. These resources imitate dating portals and resell users to various external dating products based on user data (country, device, age, activity, etc.).

2. Coin-Based — products where users must purchase coins/credits in order to message other users, upgrade their account, send gifts, etc. These products typically attract the most motivated users, as they need to return to the product and continuously top up their coin "balance" to interact on the platform.

3. Subscription — products where users purchase a subscription to the site, with a fixed fee charged monthly for access to the platform. 

These products typically look for motivated users; what matters here is not so much the user's "engagement" with the product as the initial subscription itself. 

4. Hybrid — some products offer two options: either subscribe and receive a fixed number of messages for a given period, and/or purchase a certain amount of coins that can then be spent on specific actions within the product, such as sending messages or gifts. 

A large number of subscription and coin-based products may additionally resell traffic through internal monetization elements (banners, pop-ups, push notifications). 

What does understanding the monetization type give you? 

• Pure coin-based products with no other monetization options (subscription, traffic resale, etc.) typically target a 35+ audience. It's worth adapting your creatives and approaches to this target demographic. The best traffic sources for coin-based: PPC (Google Ads), SEO, Facebook and other paid social media, as well as display — if you have a proven funnel and quality source whitelists.
• Products with hybrid monetization types are ready to accept a more diverse audience, as they have multiple options to monetize users across different channels (push notifications, resale to external advertisers, subscriptions, coins). Members area, banner (ExoClick, TrafficJunky), native, and free social media traffic work great here (e.g. traffic from niche Telegram channels).
• Click monetization products can handle large volumes of mixed audiences, including less targeted or less motivated users. The most effective traffic sources for these products include banners and members area, as well as more accessible sources such as push, teaser, and pop traffic. 

Typically, when you work with an affiliate network, your affiliate manager will help you navigate these nuances so you have the full picture and understand which traffic will be the most targeted for a given offer.

How Do Advertisers Evaluate Affiliate Traffic?

Every advertiser has their own traffic quality metrics — these can be common ones (ROI/ROAS, user activity) or proprietary. But the goal is the same for everyone: to earn more from traffic than was spent acquiring it. 

The primary metric advertisers focus on is the number of sales. That's why many advertisers don't allow the use of words like "free," "no credit card required," and similar phrases in ads. 

Recommendation  — if you have the ability to receive sales data via postback for purchases made by users from your traffic (usually the user's first purchase on the product), you'll be able to optimize more effectively and scale traffic from sources that bring in paying audiences. 

The distinctive feature of advertisers with coin-based monetization is that among the metrics they track are recurring sales, which can be spread out over a much longer period of time (weeks, months), whereas in the case of subscription and click monetization, advertisers focus on payments within the first day, or at most the first week. That's why it's common for a coin-based advertiser to ask you to pause traffic sources and then resume them a week or two later.

Recommendation — keep an eye on the number of traffic sources you pass to the advertiser. The optimal range is 10–20 sources with a sufficient number of leads from each — this helps the advertiser effectively evaluate and optimize your traffic. And don't forget to ask them to review sources that were paused a week or two ago.

It's also important to remember that two products with the same monetization type may handle user re-engagement differently after registration (via email marketing, push notifications, etc.). Some do it more effectively than others, and this factor also impacts the ROI your traffic delivers for the advertiser.

Key metrics that almost all advertisers look at and that you should be aware of:

• Metrics: SOI2DOI, CR reg2sale:
  • SOI2DOI (Sign-Up to Initial Deposit):
    • Reflects the percentage of users who registered and confirmed their email.
  • CR reg2sale (Conversion Rate from Registration to Sale):
    • Reflects the percentage of users who registered and completed a purchase or performed the desired action.
• Sales volumes:
  • The number of desired actions completed by users through affiliate links — for example, a user purchasing coins on a coin-based advertiser's site, or clicking through to an external site for advertisers with a click/advertising monetization type.
• Users Age:
  • Coin-based advertisers typically prefer older users compared to advertisers with other monetization types.
• Users Activity:
  Various metrics reflecting user activity on the site or in the app, such as session duration, photo uploads, first chat, and so on.
• ROI (Return on Investment) / ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend):
  • ROI reflects the ratio of profit to affiliate marketing spend.
  • ROAS measures how much revenue you generated for every dollar spent on advertising.

How Can an Affiliate Build Long-Term Relationships with a Network/Advertiser?

1. Before setting up ad campaigns, review all available landing pages (offer pages) and try going through the user funnel yourself, all the way to the payment step within the product. This will give you a better understanding of what approach to use in your ads. For example, if users are immediately asked to pay after registration in order to continue using the site, you need to warm up their interest thoroughly before they reach the registration step (via a pre-lander, survey, quiz, etc.).
2. Focus on the quality of the traffic you're sending to offers. Specifically, track sales where possible, request source-level optimization, ask for payout optimization, build whitelists of your best sources, and find the approaches that bring the advertiser users who will actually engage with the site and make purchases. 
3. You can also ask the advertiser for more details: which age groups perform best for them, which device types, operating systems, and browser languages. This will help you set up targeting in your traffic network correctly and reach the audience the advertiser actually needs. 
4. The funnel is the most critical stage in traffic delivery. A properly built and well-matched funnel for your traffic source and offer can deliver the results needed for a win-win outcome between the affiliate and the advertiser — whether you're running native ads, push, or pop traffic. 
5. Aim for consistent performance and deliver high quality to the advertiser, rather than chasing short-term gains or abnormal ROI. High ROI is an option, but not for long-term partnerships — in that scenario, the advertiser ends up with high costs from your traffic and loses the motivation to test new sources with you.  

If you're driving traffic to dating — join Cpamatica, get access to 1,000+ offers, in-house products, and advice from experienced affiliate managers who will help you maximize your revenue.