It’s been 8 weeks since the White Label Dating team has been working from home. With the current pandemic continuing to affect the daily lives of many, supporting our partners in keeping people online and connected at this time is at the forefront of our plans.
The steps we have taken to ensure there would be no impact to the level of service received by our partners have proven successful. We’re delighted that the external state of play hasn’t impacted our platforms ability to convert our partners’ traffic and grow their profits.
What’s new
What’s been going on at Google
Google’s Updated EU User Consent Policy
Last month and continuing into May we shared details of Google’s recent policy changes and upcoming core updates. Last month we were advised that under Google’s updated EU User Consent Policy, our partners must make certain disclosures to users in the European Economic Area (EEA) and obtain their consent for the use of cookies or other local storage where legally required, and for the collection, sharing, and use of personal data for ads personalisation. The risk of not complying with the updated policy’s requirement would mean that all sites with our partners Google Accounts could be penalised.
To support our partners, we acted fast and amended our registration forms coding (that all partners are using) to add a consent banner at the top of every landing page. There are a couple of exceptions, for example partners using pre-landers without the signup script, so we provided the code directly to them so they could add it in for themselves.
It is vital our partners are confident that all sites within their Ads accounts, whether these be White Label Dating sites or those from other platforms, are all fully compliant. We’d highly recommend separating any non-compliant sites into a separate account to eliminate the risk of unnecessary penalties on their White Label Dating sites.
Google’s May Core Update
On top of the EU consent policy update, on May 4th, Google announced that their scheduled May core update would go ahead in spite of the COVID-19 outbreak. While the full details of the update are not yet known, Google has released information showing that changes in ranking could be affected and combated with a strong SEO audit.
Relevant and unique content on all pages is more important than ever and with Google reassessing which content they deem to be relevant for a web users search query in our current climate, we’ve seen evidence that online day terms are much more likely perceived relevant than they have previously. To learn more about how the recent update may impact your sites, click here.
Brand new registration forms
We’ve recently launched a number of new registration forms that have been hugely successful in increasing user experience across a range of niche and network combinations. These have lead to an impressive uplift in click through rates and overall landing page success for our partners.
In total there are now six new registration forms available for our partners to utilise across their White Label Dating portfolios and to A/B test meaning our partners can really get the best signup conversion rates across their dating sites. More signups means more upgrades, which more importantly means more revenue!
All of our forms have a slightly different approach to prompt the user to signup. Some include all fields being shown on page load, some click through a number of steps and some have just two steps. Two of our forms use static and animated wizards that guide a user through with speech bubbles explaining the action required at each step. Using tools such as HotJar to record user activity on site, we can determine which demographics engage best with each form. More details on each of the available registrations forms can be found here.
Our Team
We’re continuing to investigate lockdown opportunities
With user intent showing a want for human contact there is an increase in people using online channels for interactions and connections. We are continuing to encourage partners to broaden their current portfolios in order to help people find what they are looking for in lockdown. We’ve been regularly investigating how search traffic is changing as a result of the the COVID outbreak. It is clear from Google Trends that online-based search terms, such as ‘chat online’, are becoming increasingly more popular in comparison to offline dating terms, such as ‘speed dating’.
The graph below shows the interest in ‘speed dating’ vs ‘chat online’ search terms in the UK. The peaks towards the top of the graphs represent peak popularity out of 100 and a point halfway means the term is half as popular at a specific point in time. These graphs demonstrate the online-based search terms becoming increasingly more popular, and being deemed considerably more relevant, since the beginning of March.
To see how May’s core update is impacting dating searches in the UK and other territories and learn more about what this means for our partners you can read more here.
We’ve been working on achieving small gains in all payments
It would be easy to say that the uplift in conversion rates we’ve been seeing across the platform have purely come as a result of COVID-19 but we’re proud to say that the considerable uplift we’ve seen in both mainstream and casual same-day conversion has come as a result of a long-term project focussing on achieving small gains in all payments.
As part of this project we looked at payment failures across all acquirers and merchants, analysed by location, device, browser, bank and more. We then challenged all assumptions to enable us to effectively optimise the billing processes and fraud prevention techniques we already have in place. The goal was to capture as much revenue as possible for our partners and we uncovered some amazing opportunities. Since actioning some pretty slick recommendations from this project we’ve already seen conversion rates sky rocket.
Since January, historically our strongest performing month in the dating calendar, our platform’s same day conversion increased by +16% in April with May showing a further +9% increase when looking at the monthly average so far. As this project continues we’re exciting to see these already impressive conversion rates grow further.
What’s to come
We’re soon to be accepting registrations via API
Our award-winning platform is soon to be accepting registrations via API. Our partners will be able to post data directly from their own affiliate databases into the WLD registration from on their landing pages, making it easier than ever to further monetise current traffic in just two clicks.
Users will need to consent to having their data transferred before registration to ensure full GDPR compliance, but the process of inputting their data is eliminated, making it a much smoother and easier process. If users have already verified their email addresses we will auto-verify them on our side to ensure they are immediately added into the email program that effectively prompts upgrades, making our partners more money, faster. All referral data can be collected and custom fields can be added to ensure effective tracking and optimisation via this method.
White Label Dating’s brand new Dating Dashboard
Following last year’s partner conference, we shared plans to launch our brand new partner portal in 2020. The new partner portal now has a name and we’re proud to introduce the soon to be complete ‘Dating Dashboard”.
The new tool will encompass industry-leading analytics, offering our partners unseen reports to help them review their metrics and campaign performance with ease, across any device. As well as new and improved reporting our partners will have access to enhanced forecasting and ROI calculations, phone and tablet apps for both iOS and Android devices to provide optimised reporting and full site management on any device, the ability to send scheduled and event-triggered reports and alerts, and lots, lots more!
As part of the plans to relaunch our partner portal, we’ve completely redesigned our site creator. With the new, improved tool, creating and duplicating sites will be extremely fast and easy! Keep your eyes peeled for May’s Inside Track as we’ll be sharing some exciting screenshots to give you a visual sneak peak of what you can expect.
We’re introducing a number of brand new, exciting, profitable niched-networks
At the the of 2019 we touched on our plans to create brand new ring fenced niched networks to increase portfolio growth opportunities for our partners and to improve our members user experience, with the aim of boosting conversion rates and in turn our partners’ ROI.
Each dedicated ring-fenced network will fulfil the requirements of each niche. We plan to use optimised onsite niche content as well as niched merchandising and blog posts to boost the content onsite. The profiles, interests and characteristics will all be specifically optimised and targeted for the appropriate audience of each niche. To learn more about the niches we have coming or to let us know which you feel you would benefit from the most get in touch with the team today.
The White Label Dating team and our partners are extremely excited about everything that’s soon to come. As well as the aforementioned projects, our pipeline includes some enhancements to the White Label Dating app to ensure we’re able to support users keep connected online through increasingly popular video stories, video profiles and video messaging! More on this early next next month! Keep your eyes peeled.
All the best,
The Team at White Label Dating
