Advertising dating sites in 2025

Campaign setup and optimization for real audience

It is now important to use the entire range of tools—from Search and Performance Max to Demand Gen and YouTube Video Ads. The only thing to keep in mind is that if you are running both search and media campaigns at the same time, you need to divide the areas of responsibility and the time of your specialists. It is difficult to expect that one person will be able to fully manage both the strategy of large-scale media campaigns and the fine-tuning of search campaigns, especially with large budgets.

Google has a built-in interest category called “Dating services” — it's great for initial targeting setup. It's a good base for launching your first campaign and gathering signals. However, don't limit yourself to built-in audiences. If you already have your own user lists — for example, emails, IDs, or other data on active customers — it's worth using them as signals to train the campaign. This will help Google quickly understand who your target audience is and which users are more likely to perform the desired actions — registration, payment, token purchase, etc.

Usually, you start with a single Demand Gen campaign. At an early stage, you can exclude Android, as it often has a high percentage of irrelevant or fake registrations. If you use Mixed or Performance Max, modern campaign types allow you to specify individual operating systems, which is convenient for filtering devices.

At the start, it is better to focus on desktop and iOS, where traffic quality indicators are higher. As for age demographics, practice shows that users aged 45+ or 55+ have the highest average check and stable behavior. It is this group that you should target at the beginning. There is also an “unknown age” segment — users whose age Google does not know. It is not worth excluding them: they often include a high-quality audience, just without specific data.

The next important setting is optimized targeting. It is better to turn it off at the start of the campaign. Let the ad first collect statistics, get the first conversions, and determine the basic behavior model of the audience. When stable results appear, you can enable optimization and see if the metrics improve.

Another useful setting is “Restrict age expansion.” If you have selected a target audience of 45+, enable this option so that the campaign does not go to 18-24 year olds, where results are usually weaker.

Correct conversion settings are a key factor. As in other niches, everything here depends on correct conversions. If your goals are set up correctly, Google will be able to optimize your campaign for actions that actually bring in money, rather than just clicks or fake registrations.

The classic dating funnel looks like this:
* User registration;
* Email or phone confirmation;
* First account top-up;
* Repeat payments (LTV).

If you have a large amount of traffic, you can gradually shift your focus from the “registration” conversion to deeper stages — for example, “first deposit” or “first payment.” This gives Google a more accurate signal that this type of user is valuable to the business.

The main thing is not to send too few conversions. If you only have 1-2 paying customers per week, the system simply won't be able to learn. In this case, it's better to go back to the level above — work with registrations or confirmed emails, where the volume is higher.

When the volume grows, you can gradually move on to optimizing for more valuable events — for example, second or third purchases, or users who have spent over $100–$500. This data can also be fed back into the advertising account to enable Value Bidding — a value-based bidding strategy.

Be careful with Value Bidding and anomalies. Google is currently actively promoting Value Bidding, and it can really work for dating. But there is a caveat: if there is one anomalous user in the sample who has spent, say, $20,000, the system can “go crazy” — sharply shift the budget and start looking for similar “ideal customers” who do not exist in reality.

In such cases, Google will assume that you are making incredible profits and will stop showing ads in the required volumes because you have “already achieved your goal.” Therefore, it is always worth checking the accuracy of the data, excluding statistical outliers, and dividing campaigns into:
* basic — for registration and engagement;
* advanced — for payment and LTV.

This allows you to balance your strategy and maintain control over training.

What to test and how to scale

The workflow for most dating projects is currently as follows:
* Demand Gen launch campaign with audience and device testing
* Parallel Performance Max campaign to collect additional signals
* Gradual expansion through Value Bidding or manual conversion control

When you see stable results, feel free to scale up. The main thing to remember is that if a campaign type or device is giving you the best results today, that doesn't guarantee that tomorrow will be the same.
Google changes its algorithms, and what worked in March may not work in May. That's why it's important to regularly test and adapt your combinations so you don't lose momentum.

Search and Performance Max: how to train campaigns. If you want to launch search advertising but don't want to spend time manually working with keywords, be prepared for the fact that the dating niche is very broad and “blurry.” There is no clear correlation between hot search queries and high average checks. Sometimes the most popular keywords attract users who don't pay anything, while seemingly strange queries attract good customers.

Therefore, in dating, it is better to launch campaigns with broad relevance. But this requires patience. You need to regularly analyze search queries, exclude irrelevant ones, add new ones, adjust negative keyword lists, and give the campaign time to learn. Sometimes a keyword may seem illogical — for example, “email singles.” At first glance, it seems irrelevant, but in reality, it can generate high-quality registrations and a good ROI. Statistics, not intuition, are what matter.

To collect a sufficient amount of data, you will need to invest time and budget—several iterations of optimization and restarts. This is a normal process. The main thing is not to rush to conclusions until the campaign has passed the learning phase. If you don't want to bother with classic search, you can take a different route — launch Performance Max, which includes both search and other channels.

The only thing is, you need to prepare it correctly:
* add more extensions (links, clarifications, offers),
* upload texts adapted to the search format,
* make fewer banners and media images.

In other words, you need to “skew” Performance Max towards search activity so that it works like a Search campaign rather than a banner campaign.

If everything is set up correctly, PMax can learn and start bringing in stable registrations faster than a classic search campaign. This is especially true if you already have conversion data and good audience signals.

Working with brands, competitors, and CREATIVES

Don't forget about branded queries.
You can launch a separate campaign for them or allow Performance Max to cover them — but be sure to make sure that competitors are not using your brand in their advertising.

In the dating niche, this is a common practice — less scrupulous sites put other brands in keywords to attract users.
To combat this, you can:
* use third-party infringement monitoring services,
* write directly to competitors demanding that they remove the brand,
* or work through Google representatives and file a complaint about trademark infringement.

The main thing is to test creatives consciously.

And perhaps the most important thing in dating is working with creatives.
Tests need to be conducted constantly, but they must be done meaningfully.

Don't evaluate the effectiveness of advertising based solely on CTR, CPM, or even the number of registrations. These metrics are misleading.
You can create a “clickbait” ad that will collect a bunch of clicks and cheap registrations — but then it turns out that users don't make a single payment because they expected a different product.

Therefore, you need to analyze paying users — at least by their first payment, but better by their average check.
This is the only way to understand the real value of the creative.

There should be a lot of creatives, but it is worth testing them in a cycle of at least two weeks.
Initial signals — CTR, price per registration — can be viewed after a couple of days. If the indicators are really bad, disable them without regret.
But if the basic metrics are normal, give the ad time to accumulate data on payments and average check.

Sometimes, creatives with low CTR end up bringing in the best users — because those who are genuinely interested are the ones who click.

The main goal is not just to collect registrations, but to get quality customers who stay and pay.

Key points

To sum up, we have already discussed the main technical aspects—setting up Demand Gen campaigns, structure, signals, and conversions—in detail in a separate case study.
Here, we wanted to show the specifics of dating and how creativity plays a decisive role in this niche.

Yes, creative is the heart of an advertising campaign.
But it's important not just to make a “pretty picture” or “catchy text,” but to understand where exactly the creative worked: on which placement, on which device, with which audience, and how it passed moderation.
Because, no matter how you look at it, in dating, everyone wants to show the most attractive photos and bold texts — and moderation often cuts such ads.

If you have stable creative content that has been tested and consistently delivers good results — don't touch it.
Don't make changes to the campaign, don't update the texts, and don't replace banners “just to refresh.”
Google may resubmit the ad for moderation, and you will lose all your training and accumulated signals.

If you want to test new creatives, create separate campaigns.
Let each of them “find” its own audience, placement, and device, where it will stick and show results.
This way, you will maintain the effectiveness of your existing campaigns while constantly expanding your pool of creatives without risking your current results.