Dating Service Demographics Research
Who visits those dating sites? Who buys their services? I used to ask these questions browsing through thousands of profiles. It is not that easy to draw some common dating service persona profile.
But once you are a member of a few popular online dating services – you can give a try. Well, at that point I guess one does not need any research for an average online dating service visitor/ client profile. Or need it?
A rough sketch of an average dating service customer:
FEMALE AGED 30-45
MALE AGED 30-45
Female vs. male ratio: 60% vs. 40%.
There are some nice online tools that will help us to check it if I am right or wrong. Certainly, these are not 100% exact research results, but much better than nothing.
One can get idea who visits general dating services and who frequents religious or gay/ lesbian services. We will apply Quantcast & MSN AdLab Demographic Prediction tool. It is god to compare data that we will get from these tools – will they be similar? Let’s see.
I will check a number of services reviewed at this website and you can go on if you find this research interesting and, most importantly, useful:
|
Dating Service |
Quantcast |
MSN AdLab Demographic Prediction |
|
US traffic: 651.5K Males: 55% Females: 45% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 56% Females: 44% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 7.8M Males: 57% Females: 43% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 47% Females: 53% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 302.9K Males: 43% Females: 57% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 40% Females: 60% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 657.2K Males: 47% Females: 53% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 43% Females: 57% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 550.0K Males: 41% Females: 59% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 35% Females: 65% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 7.5M Males: 45% Females: 55% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 44% Females: 56% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
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US traffic: 998.0K Males: 82% Females: 18% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Males: 86% Females: 14% Popular Age Group: 35-49 |
Well, I was quite right about age, but mistaken about male vs. female ratio in certain cases. And it is a surprise that some dating services (see AmericanSingles) can boast of large male customer bases (I do not speak of Gay.com)
Another surprise – most data that come from two tools are nearly identical – and we can accept this as a sign that these tools are reliable sources for research and competitive intelligence.
You can certainly use these tools for much deeper research – for examining dating services or other sites. Quantcast provides heaps of valuable data to analyze:
- Traffic
- Demographic
- Business
- Lifestyle
- Geographic
Nice charts, cool interface and all FREE. I really enjoy this service and I think you will find it useful also.
Most Generous Dating Affiliate Programs
In the recent post we listed online techniques dating services can and do apply to drive traffic to their sites.
We discussed PPC advertising in detail. To be exact, we have tried to spy on the budgets top dating services spend for AdWords pay-per-click engine. Certainly, not 100% exact, but good enough to get some competitive intelligence.
If you go through the list of the online marketing techniques popular with matchmaking services you will run into affiliate programs. No doubt it is a powerful way to get traffic to your dating service. I am not sure what traffic % comes through affiliates, but I am sure that it is a considerable % of the total traffic top dating services get. Make some online research for competitive dating keywords and see lists of sites that are signed with lots of dating services.
Another proof that dating services benefit greatly from affiliate programs is a great number of those affiliate programs. One dating service can run it in-house and at the same time recruit affiliates through 3-10 affiliate networks offering slightly different terms through each network.
Dating services have a few affiliate program types for paying their affiliates:
- payment for each free subscriber (in the range of $1-5.00 for each free registration)
- payment for each paid client (in the range of $10-100.00 for each paid subscriber)
What are the most generous dating services paying highest fees to their affiliates? It is hard to say – most top performing affiliates get private deals with the services and their rates can go up to 30% .
Nevertheless, we will look through the payout structure for a number of a few dating services to get a better idea why dating industry is so competitive not just for dating services, but also for their affiliates:
|
Dating Service |
Affiliate Commission Payout |
|
Up to $120 per sale $0.25 for every lead |
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$3.75 for every lead |
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Up to $50 per sale |
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Up to $188.50 per sale |
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Up to $100 per sale |
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Up to $102 per sale |
I have copied the above numbers from my affiliate account – we are signed with ALL reviewed services on this website. Impressed with the payout size? And it is just the tip of an iceberg.
It is not easy to get paid customers now – with that amount of free dating services and social networks, it was easier a few years back: browse lots of dating sites (dating tips, dating services reviews, etc) out there - they are no more updated for 1-2 years, I assure you that this is due to the decrease of paid subscribers.
But you see those numbers and they help just to grasp the scale of online dating industry and the money that circulate out there.
It also becomes evident that it is hard for new players to enter online dating industry – even for free services with creative thinking. Those top dating services have an enormous team of affiliates who push their sites to get some commission driving traffic, referring free and paid subscribers, building dating service brand awareness.
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) |
|
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0.25-2.97K |
3.3K (April 08) |
|
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2.17-21.2K |
14.0K (April 08) |
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1.0-16.0K |
16.5K (April 08) |
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1.3-7.4K |
8.4K (April 08) |
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1.1-11K |
1.7K (April 08) |
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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) |
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0.2-2.2K |
2.3K (April 08) |
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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.