Dating Services: What Are Heaviest PPC Spenders?
Online dating services are nowadays focused primarily on marketing their services, not developing extra complicated technology (though it should be really good). This is my opinion, it might be wrong.
There are many ways for online companies to market their services including offline marketing - it is a matter of budget.
If you think about online marketing techniques – you should mention:
- SEO/ SEM (search engine optimization/ search engine marketing including social media optimization),
- e-mail marketing,
- affiliate programs,
- CPM (impression advertising) ads
- PPC (pay-per-click engines)
There are more techniques – like text link purchases, sponsorships, etc, but those mentioned are key online marketing techniques that can pull considerable traffic to the dating services sites.
It is hard (next to impossible) to measure amounts of money dating services spend on SEO/ SEM, CPM – we can just judge by their search engine results to make some guesses or get some insider’s information leakage.
But there are some tools – not 100% exact – that allow us to see PPC budget of companies including online dating services. We can see the amount they spend with one, but top PPC platform – Google AdWords
There are a few online tools that enable us to get this info. I have chosen SpyFu for our test.
What is remarkable about these services is that they allow you also to see what keywords those dating companies buy, what ad copies they use. Also it is an excellent marketing tool to research the competition scene in any niche where you need to get competitive intelligence. I just want to repeat that data you get is not 100% exact and might be not up-to-date. Just keep this in mind when you do some serious market research.
I will cover in this article PPC budgets by general dating services and some niche focused Let’s see who has money to burn with PPC advertising :
|
Dating Service |
Avg Daily Budget |
Avg Monthly Budget |
|
3.58-15.8K |
28.5K (April 08) |
|
|
0.8-5.35K |
4.0K (April 08) |
|
|
0.25-2.97K |
3.3K (April 08) |
|
|
2.17-21.2K |
14.0K (April 08) |
|
|
1.0-16.0K |
16.5K (April 08) |
|
|
1.3-7.4K |
8.4K (April 08) |
|
|
1.1-11K |
1.7K (April 08) |
|
|
1.4-9.7K |
11.3K (April 08) |
And now, let’s compare religious dating services budgets spend for PPC:
|
Dating Service |
Avg Daily Budget |
Avg Monthly Budget |
|
0.1-0.7K |
1.0K (April 08) |
|
|
0.2-2.2K |
2.3K (April 08) |
|
|
0.3-2.0K |
2.0K (April 08) |
Hopefully, you enjoyed this post and have more ideas how to use the information you can extract from this source.
Dating Services Most Favored By Google (Or Best Marketed?)
I would like to carry out another test with selected dating sites – my plan is to check how many pages indexed by Google and how many incoming links Google displays for each particular site.
This info is to show how good those dating services are at online marketing and search engine optimization.
As a result, we will see Google most saturated dating sites. It is another metric to evaluate general performance of online dating services. Websites with 100 000 indexed pages are likely to do better than those with 1000. Google will not crawl insignificant (from his bot’s point of view) sites that deep and much.
When it comes to incoming links I should mention that Google does not display all links with his command link:www.site.com So, the stats do not reflects all dating service incoming links, but part of them.
I will do this test with general dating services that as we know from our previous researches are much more trafficked than specialty services.
|
Dating Site |
Indexed Pages |
Inbound Links |
|
316 000 |
2 920 |
|
|
87 |
9 |
|
|
158 000 |
507 |
|
|
14 700 |
712 |
|
|
304 |
172 |
|
|
73 500 |
3 |
|
|
355 |
27 |
|
|
5 870 000 |
128 |
|
|
519 |
523 |
|
|
241 000 |
43 |
|
|
1 300 000 |
484 |
|
|
56 000 |
1070 |
It is not the first time we see that search engines data is not as reliable as we would like it to be. One test shows us that certain dating services are on top, another test conducted in the same search engine proves that completely different services should be doing great with search engines. Though with our today’s test it is quite possible that numerous pages are protected from bot crawling for privacy issues.
What data are reliable? I think the data that the dating services get using their in-house web analytics systems. The data that no outsider can get access to…
Dating Industry Quick Links for July 14-20, 2008
- We have published an entire series of dating service traffic estimations based on Google Trends Tool.
Hitwise has released their own rankings with top three dating sites in traffic – Singlesnet, Plenty of Fish, Yahoo! Personals. Find more rankings here
- Another valuable piece of Hitwise info published this week – top dating terms in June 2008:
1. match.com 4.67%
2. plentyoffish 3.40%
3. plenty of fish 2.63%
4. singlesnet.com 2.48%
5. singlesnet 2.18%
6. adam4adam 1.79%
7. eharmony 1.41%
8. plentyoffish.com 1.37%
9. www.plentyoffish.com 1.21%
10. datehookup 1.09%
It is fun to compare them with the same list dated 2006
- Yahoo! Personals is a great dating service, but they are also a cool source of dating tips: A Dating Guide for Women: “Man Talk” Translation published this week.
- Teenagers market is a great place for dating sites as it is really huge, but there are lots of issues teenager dating services run into like paedophiles. BBC covers story of MyLOL.net