Running gambling traffic but tired of ad account bans, cut traffic, and shaving? Try finance offers. Your experience with creatives, media buying, and analytics will carry over nicely. Let’s break down how to choose an offer, launch your first campaign, and evaluate the results.
For a quick start, sign up with Leadgid and pick offers that fit your traffic right away.
Contents
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How to choose a traffic source and GEO
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How to choose a product and a payable action
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What to clarify with your manager before launch
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How to prepare creatives and set up conversion tracking
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What a finance showcase is and when you need one
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How to evaluate your first test
For your first test, stick with a familiar traffic source
Go with a familiar GEO, too. Make sure the offer accepts your type of traffic and the platform allows ads for the product.
Use the tracker you already know. Set up a separate campaign for the finance product and choose the audience, creatives, and optimization goal from scratch.
Pick one product: loans, credit cards, or debit cards
Start with one type of offer: loans, credit cards, and debit cards have different audiences and payout terms.
Loans. Borrowers care about the amount, term, cost, and how they’ll receive the money. The advertiser may pay for a valid application or for an issued loan. In the first case, clarify the lead requirements. In the second, count only loans that were actually paid out: an approved application isn’t enough.
Credit cards. Users look at the credit limit, grace period, and annual fee. The bank decides whether to approve the card and what limit to set. The payable action can be card issuance, activation, or the first purchase, so check the offer terms.
Debit cards. In your creative, you can focus on cashback and account fees. The payout may require card issuance, activation, or a purchase. A single application isn’t always enough.
Compare several offers within the category. If you test several at once, track the results of each one separately.
What to clarify with your manager before launch
Before launch, find out:
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Which traffic sources and platforms are allowed.
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Which action is paid and what an application has to meet to qualify for payout.
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Who counts as a new user and whether repeat applications are paid.
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What the cap is, what happens once it’s reached, how long confirmation takes, and when the payout arrives.
Look at the payout together with the conversion rate to a paid action. A high payout won’t help if only a few users make it to the target action.
Forget your gambling habits
Finance and gambling audiences think in completely different ways. Casino players and people looking for a loan or a credit card are entirely different personality types with opposite motivations.
Don’t carry over your old gambling creatives built on emotions, quick wins, and easy hype to finance offers. Moderation won’t approve them, and conversion will be zero. Finance products need a new strategy and rational creatives.
Working with your own databases (for example, Telegram or email newsletters) is a separate tool. But when you buy traffic from paid sources, you need a clean approach built from scratch.
Build your creative around a specific offer
Show a concrete benefit: the loan amount and term, cashback, or card fees. State the conditions the benefit depends on.
Don’t promise anything the advertiser doesn’t guarantee. “Everyone gets approved” is a classic example: the lender still checks every borrower.
The ad and the landing page must offer the same thing. Promoting a card? Send users to that card’s terms. Offering to help pick a loan? Send them to a loan comparison.
Before launch, get your creative and landing page approved by the advertiser.
Expect strict moderation and platform rules
Moderation in the finance vertical is extremely strict because of tough legal requirements for advertising financial services. Platforms ban aggressive approaches, clickbait, and unrealistic promises much faster and harder than in gambling.
Under Google Ads policies, personal loans can only be advertised if the full repayment term is 61 days or longer. This applies to lenders and intermediaries alike: running traffic through a showcase doesn’t get you around it.
Ask your manager which documents you’ll need to pass verification for the chosen offer.
Set up conversions so you can see revenue
Before launch, check your click ID and postbacks: every conversion must be tied to its campaign and creative.
Find out which statuses the advertiser sends and which one means the payout has been credited.
If you’re paid for issued loans but your ads optimize for applications, track how many applications actually end with the borrower getting the money.
Send confirmed conversions back to the ad platform if your integration allows it. If there are few events or they arrive with a delay, test an intermediate goal and see whether it leads to paid actions.
Calculate both the cost per application and the cost per paid action.
Applications are coming in, but few get paid: what to check
Applications don’t reach the advertiser’s site. Check the link, redirects, and loading on mobile devices.
Users abandon the form. Check the form itself, identity verification, and whether the terms match your ad. If you can’t see the application steps, ask your manager to check them.
Users get rejected. Ask the advertiser for the reasons: user requirements, credit history, lending restrictions. A “rejected” status alone isn’t enough to draw conclusions.
The action was completed but not counted. Check for duplicates, new-user conditions, and attribution. Send your manager the IDs of the disputed applications.
Before the test, find out which steps and rejection reasons are available in the report.
When switching offers won’t help
Lenders have different requirements, but some restrictions apply to the entire market.
In some GEOs, the regulator sets rules that every lender has to follow, such as limits on how many active loans one borrower can hold. If a rule like that applies to the user, switching lenders won’t lift it: any lender is required to reject the application. Check with your manager which market-wide restrictions apply in your GEO.
Ask the advertiser for the rejection reason: a low approval rate on its own doesn’t prove that a restriction was triggered.
What a finance showcase is and when to use one
A finance showcase is a page with several loan or card offers. The user compares the terms and clicks through to the advertiser.
For your first test, you can send traffic straight to a single offer. Add a showcase if you want to give users a choice or compare several offers within one funnel.
Leadgid offers a ready-made showcase, automatic traffic distribution tools, and a dedicated manager to help you launch fast. Set up offers for your GEO and check your links.
If you use a SmartLink, find out how it picks the offer and where it sends traffic when an offer is paused or hits its cap. Check whether the distribution is visible in your report.
Revenue per incoming click = confirmed revenue / number of purchased incoming clicks. Don’t count clicks between offer cards in the denominator: one visitor can open several offers.
How to evaluate your first test
Before launch, set a budget and a test period that leave enough time for conversions to be confirmed.
Track the following separately for each campaign, creative, and offer:
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how much you spent on traffic;
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how many users reached the advertiser;
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how many applications came in;
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how many actions the advertiser confirmed;
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how much revenue was credited for those actions.
Give all applications the same amount of time to be processed. Don’t compare one offer’s confirmed results with another offer’s applications that are still pending.
Once results are confirmed, calculate ROI including all costs. If the test didn’t pay off, find the reason: expensive traffic, abandoned forms, rejections, or actions that weren’t counted.
Before scaling your budget, check the cap and the terms for working at higher volume. Plan for working capital until payout: credited revenue isn’t money in your account yet.
Ready to launch your first campaign? Sign up with Leadgid, connect verified finance offers, and message your manager!
