$1.5 million revenue per month and 30% ROI on showcases or how to scale up in a new niche — a case by LuckyTeam

Hello everyone, my name is Dmitry Zorkin, and I’m the head of four media buying teams within the LuckyTeam agency. In this article, I will tell you how we used our CIS approach in content marketing while targeting the international market and achieved $1.5 million in revenue per month.

Introduction: a few words about me and the team

My journey at LuckyTeam started in 2018 when I joined as a regular media buyer, running nutra campaigns from native networks. Within a year, I grew into a team lead, and currently, I’m the head of the team.

As of March 2024, my team consists of over 80 people, and we work with 4 verticals: nutra COD/SS, crypto, and the content marketing vertical, commonly known as news showcases. Today, I’ll share our growth story, successful strategies, and plans for the future.

Dmitry Zorkin — the head of four media buying teams at LuckyTeam.

Hypothesis about the prospects of showcases in the foreign market and monetization tests

Initially, there were three people in the team, and we simply drove traffic to nutra offers. In parallel with growing the team in the direction of e-commerce, we also developed in the direction of showcases. We drove traffic to news showcases through the LuckyFeed platform. All of this was on the CIS market.

We noticed an interesting phenomenon: in the CIS countries, the competition for showcases, with which we also actively worked, was very high, while on Western GEOs, it was noticeably lower. Neither in spy services nor in the market as a whole did we practically see anyone working with foreign showcases.

This seemed strange to us because news is interesting to people worldwide, and they were actively utilized in the CIS. However, for affiliate marketing in the West, they were somehow not as actively and consistently applied. This led us to a hypothesis that we wanted to test and began taking the first steps.

We had already been working with nutra on the foreign market and were looking for ways to increase profits from the existing traffic volume. That's when we started thinking about additionally monetizing the traffic leaving the landing page — for this, we put together a simple showcase with static product offers in HTML and placed it on the backlink.

After a few days of testing, we started to receive an additional 10-15% profit from it, realizing that even such a primitive funnel was effective, and we proceeded to improve it.

Here's how this showcase looked like:

Direct traffic to the showcase

Based on our experience with direct traffic to news in the CIS, we understood that content has advantages in terms of simplicity of moderation compared to the same nutra creatives, as well as the ability to gather more traffic, since the audience for news is significantly wider than the audience for offers from any other vertical. Together, these advantages make it easier and cheaper to acquire traffic for news.

To transition to direct traffic generation on the foreign market, we used our experience in traffic monetization — we generated single-page sites with news surrounded by static advertising banners with several teasers for nutra offers. The news itself was sourced from the pension theme — this approach worked well in the CIS then and now, as the age of the target audience for nutra offers from the advertising banners is 45 years old and older.

After testing the traffic on five news reports about Hungary, we achieved decent results — approximately 20% ROI, with a daily spend of around $500. The traffic volumes in the initial stage were very small, and the first traffic source we used was the native advertising network Taboola. Next, we conducted tests on several other GEOs — for example, this is how the news showcase for Slovakia looked like:

Then we realized that direct campaigns on the foreign market have potential, and we began to think about scaling up.

For several months, we actively tried to develop this direction independently. However, we understood that we'd need to simultaneously work with multiple different GEOs, analyze profitability, compare traffic volumes, and promptly redirect resources to focus on the most lucrative combinations.

The challenge was that we didn't know how to implement this technically while dealing with large traffic volumes, plus we simply didn't have enough buyers on the team. Also, there was a need for extensive testing: various news topics in large quantities and the ads on the showcase itself, to ensure that the traffic coming to the news was monetized as efficiently as possible.

We realized how challenging this work was and that without a large team, creating a quality product would be extremely difficult. At the same time, our colleagues from the LuckyFeed project, after several years of successful work in various CIS GEOs, began planning to enter the Western market. The pieces of the puzzle fell into place — they had the technical resources needed to process traffic that we lacked, while we had the knowledge and positive experience of testing content marketing in the Western market.

Scaling and collaboration with LF

We started working together with LF on the Western market at the end of 2021. LuckyFeed took on the issues related to monetizing incoming traffic to the showcase — the guys worked on automatic smart algorithms for rotating ads, content, analytics, and other product related tasks. Perhaps the most important thing is that they helped us with automating ad serving. Previously, we manually looked at the statistics for each teaser, putting the ones with better conversion rates in rotation and adjusting or removing those with lower rates. However, LuckyFeed had the technical capabilities to automate this process, which helped save a lot of time and move towards active scaling.

While the guys from the LF took on these issues, we focused on generating traffic in new GEOs — testing approaches, searching for new cloaking methods in native networks, and increasing volumes.

Such a distribution of responsibilities and the smooth operation of both projects allowed us to start opening up GEOs one by one in a short period of time, thereby increasing profits for both sides.

Essentially, we were building a new vertical in the foreign market from scratch, without relying on anyone, and with each passing day, we became more convinced that content marketing was a breakthrough. Moreover, the work and cloaking methods here expand significantly compared to all other verticals. Neither in crypto, nor in e-commerce, nor in gambling, nor anywhere else, have we seen such opportunities as we have in native networks and Google CMS on a news showcase.

Content marketing differs from other verticals. Firstly, it benefits from the market volume. Secondly, there are fewer moderation issues here. You can easily "push through" almost any offer through thematic news. Let me explain with an example. Suppose you need to pass moderation for a potency offer: such offers typically encounter moderation issues on various platforms. However, the content marketing vertical allows you to prepare an article or news tailored to men aged 45+, the target audience of this offer, and then place teasers for the desired offer within this news or article, avoiding moderation issues. Additionally, in content marketing, you can buy a lot of traffic at a relatively cheap price due to high CTR of ads: news teasers are more clickable than product teasers.

Speaking of money, in good months, revenue figures range from $1.3 to $1.5 million, and in bad months, it's $300 000 to $500 000. It all depends on bans from sources, the situation in the Google auction, and other fluctuating factors.

Our record in native ads for a month: total revenue of $1 567 628 with a 30% ROI.

The record was set in August 2023. At that time, we had been collaborating with LuckyFeed for almost two years: opening one GEO after another, facing many challenges with some of them, which we managed to overcome and achieve successful results. In the end, we were able to achieve a record result and generated 175 000 leads across 26 GEOs in one month using news and articles.

Screenshot of our internal CRM system with detailed breakdown by GEO and traffic volumes.

What we’ve achieved in 2 years of partnership

When we started splitting our showcase and LuckyFeed showcase, our team consisted of 15 people. Now we have over 80, with 26 of them exclusively engaged in content marketing on the LuckyFeed platform. Within the LuckyGroup holding, other teams are also developing in this direction: the processes are set up so that we help each other grow. Our strength lies in having many specialists with different expertise, which we gladly share with one another. If we see growth potential in any vertical or source, we promptly exchange detailed information, helping each other.

Furthermore, this experience has not only opened up a new vertical for earning revenue in more than 20 GEOs for our team and helped other teams within the holding to develop, but it has also made this opportunity available to hundreds of LuckyFeed partners and webmasters from around the world. They learn about LuckyFeed at international conferences and forums, launch traffic, and earn on news showcases in international GEOs alongside us.

Conclusions and plans

For us, $1.5 million is not the limit, and we continue to develop in content marketing because our experience has repeatedly shown that there is a future behind this vertical and many new profit records. For example, right now, our primary goal is to work steadily in Canada, the USA, and Australia, and replicate our success in these GEOs, which we’ve achieved in other Tier-1 countries.