€500k/month Marketing Campaign Manager at a Top-Five Dating Group

The Problem

Optimize marketing spend across channels, campaigns, publishers, creatives, and target groups. Optimization was done based on ROAS with a target of 1.0, measured as ad spend against revenue booked at the customer’s first upfront subscription payment.

Two different channels. Roughly €400k a month sat in affiliate and €100k in native display. Display spend is controlled through bids, publishers, and creative. Affiliate spend is controlled through people: which partners are in the program, on what terms, and whether they are following them.

Fast feedback. Around 90% of sales driven by ad spend converted within five days, allowing for fast iteration and optimization based on measured outcomes.

Heavy seasonality. Dating demand concentrates around Christmas and New Year. The budget was not a flat monthly figure but a dynamic process to plan for and scale into.

3 brands, 2 geos. Multi-brand portfolio of 3 brands across 2 geos

Approach

Campaigns scaled as long as the marginal ad spend achieved the ROAS target. Spend followed performance. Channels, publishers, audiences, and creatives were each measured against the ROAS threshold to optimize performance.

Main KPI: ROAS
Secondary KPIs: CPM, CPI, CTR, in-platform conversion rates, CPAs (e.g. cost per registration)

Running the affiliate program operations

The program was already established when I took over it, and partner acquisition ran mostly inbound as the company was a top player in the industry. Publishers applied rather than being recruited. That made program management the primary job.

Performance management by partner: Monitored each publisher’s trend. Declining performance triggered a conversation to find the cause, which frequently reached outside the affiliate program. For example, SEO and SEA affiliates operate in the same search results as the in-house SEO and SEA teams, so diagnosing a drop often meant pulling those teams in.
Commercial terms: Negotiated commissions with partners to balance scale (based on profitability and plannability for the affiliate), risk (who takes on the risk of users not converting) and profitability for us. Commercial terms included how much affiliates get paid and based on which metrics (e.g. signups, revenue)
Compliance with program’s terms of service: Affiliates were continously monitored for compliance with our terms of service, including adherence to relevant regulations, the company’s branding guidelines, and restrictions for e-mail marketing, SEM and voucher listings.
Fraud screening: Conversion rates got screened for statistical plausibility. Separately, partner sites were reviewed manually to identify malpractice, such as voucher sites promoting non-existent codes.

Building a new channel from zero

Outbrain did not exist as a channel. The decision to add it was mainly a scalability and incrementality question, weighed against setup cost.

Decision factors: How much inventory Outbrain actually had, and whether their publishers overlapped with inventory already being bought elsewhere. A new channel that resells the same audience adds cost without adding customers. Worst case: We might bid against ourselves for the same placement.

Why it scaled: The learnings from other native networks transferred to Outbrain, including which creatives perform well, profitable bid strategies across publishers, publisher blacklists, and tested landing pages. What Outbrain contributed was inventory. Research through first test ran about two months. Afterwards, the channel settled in as an always-on line at €50k monthly spend.

Working across the organization

The brands held top-three television advertising reach in their primary market, so paid media never operated in isolation. Campaign work ran through the creative team on assets, brand on messaging fit and term approvals, legal on partner terms and promotional compliance, the SEO and SEA teams on search overlap, and analytics on tracking and attribution.

Outcome

€500k monthly budget: managed across affiliate (~€400k) and native display (~€100k)
1.0 target ROAS held: measured on first subscription payment
€50k monthly: new native channel built from zero to always-on in about two months