Dating site seeks love-seekers by city location on mobile

In the latter part of last year Lovestruck.com, one of the UK’s leading dating websites on mobile and desktop, came to us with quite a challenge. The location-aware dating site wanted to promote its free iPhone application to users in London, and only in London. We often get asked to run campaigns in one country or on specific handsets, but this was the first time that we had been asked to focus a campaign on one city, in the UK.

The campaign kicked off in May 2010 and ran across our network of mobile websites and iPhone applications.  However, unlike other campaigns, the ads promoting the Lovestruck.com app were only shown to iPhone users in London. To get the app, users simply had to click on the banner ad and they were taken through to the App Store download page for the Lovestruck.com app.

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For Lovestruck.com the key benefit of this geo-targeted approach was that it allowed them to align the campaign with the company's strategy of expanding its membership base in the UK's capital city. But this wasn't the only benefit that Lovestruck.com saw. The campaign generated a far greater return on investment than other nationwide campaigns, as it was able to target potential users more closely.

The campaign exceeded expectations considerably.  Cost per Downloads (CPD) were more than 76 percent lower than expected. This meant that we were able to work with mobile media agency Fetch Media to immediately scale the campaigns, increasing budget by more than 60 percent.

Lovestruck.com was so happy with the results of the campaign that it now spends 40 percent of its marketing budget on mobile, and has rolled out similar geo-targeted campaigns in Singapore and Hong Kong. To download the full Lovestruck case study, please click this link. 

Posted by Matt Brocklehurst, Google Mobile Ads Marketing Team