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Hey everyone! Artem here again, Team Lead at ArtemyAff.
After my last article on Public Sweepstake Offers, my DMs literally blew up. I got a huge response: many people reached out with questions, some reposted the material in their channels, and we even recruited a few sharp guys into the team. Huge thanks to the community for this feedback; it was pleasant and, honestly, unexpected!
It was thanks to that article that the case study I want to share today happened. It’s about how «affiliate» methods from aggressive CPA marketing can flip the script in white-hat, seemingly boring E-commerce.
After the article dropped, Pasha messaged me. We were casual acquaintances before but hadn't spoken in ages. Pasha and his partner run an E-commerce vertical. It’s a pretty serious level:
They run traffic to their own offers, but there is one major problem familiar to everyone working with white-hat products: near-zero ROI.
In modern E-com, if a campaign breaks even or shows a minimal plus, that’s already a success. All hope is built on LTV: that the customer will return, buy something else, or recommend the brand to friends. They earn on the «long game», but at the traffic acquisition stage, they are simply burning budget to capture market share.
Naturally, the guys did everything «by the book»:
But the problem is that all competitors do more or less the same thing.
Pasha read about the sweepstakes approaches and wondered: «Can we apply this 'affiliate magic' to us, in a white-hat brand?»
We met in early November with Pasha and his business partner over a couple of «cups of tea» and brainstormed. I have to say: I respect people who, even during the seasonal grind (Q4 in E-com is hell!), look forward rather than at their feet. It’s a pleasure doing business with such people.
And here’s what really surprised me. It felt like, in terms of media buying, the E-commerce industry is lagging behind typical «affiliate» verticals by several years.
If Sweepstakes affiliates, Casino buyers, or Nutra gangs ran traffic the way dropshippers do in 2026, we’d all be broke and working at a factory by now.
What I saw:
Yo, affiliates! Can you imagine running traffic for a year to the same lander? But in E-com, everyone does it. :)
Look at the Frequency metrics below — it shows that we didn't burn out the audience as much, even with the budget scale.
We decided to transfer aggressive performance marketing technologies to their white-hat rails.
By the way, GC added Nutra in late December; maybe we'll get around to testing it ourselves, but that’s not for today.
Time passed, and the guys came back with feedback. Sharing what they managed to implement.
1. Comments as an extension of the approach First things first, they added Comdrop to the campaign launch flow. The guys from Golden Circle pitched ideas on how to develop the creative in the comments. Now it’s not just «Cool product, I'm happy», but entire mini-stories, Q&As, and (controlled) drama/debates, which increase trust.
2. Lander Variability They coded up (or «vibecoded») 7 variations of landers. Hosted it all in the Zeustrack tracker. For the E-com team, this was mind-blowing: they had never used external trackers. GC helped set up the connection with FB via Conversion API, passing leads into the tracker and back to the shop.
3. White Cloaking Implemented landers for Andromeda. The trick is that we give Facebook bots pages with specific content and triggers that real users don't see. This allows us to manipulate FB targeting, forcing it to find audiences it previously ignored. (If you're interested in technical details, welcome to my DMs, it’s too long to write here).
Look at the Frequency metrics below — it shows that we didn't burn out the audience as much, even with the budget scale.
4. Native Posts with Beautiful Link Most of the posts, especially in the overheated US market, are now run without the «Shop Now» button. We use an approach typical for Sweeps: a native post + a properly formatted link (Zeus has a built-in shortener) in the first pinned comment.
Insight: E-com with this approach catches about 10x more organic traffic (shares, viral reach) than we see on Sweepstakes. For some reason, people are more willing to repost products.
[SCREENSHOT EXAMPLE with post and comments]
5. Personnel Their Team Lead finished the bootcamp in two weeks instead of a month. The main focus was on tech, lander management, and comments. The media buyer is super happy: his eyes have been opened, and he has instruments to influence the result other than just «change the picture».
To back this up, check out the stats for their flagship product in December. During this period, both the old «classic» campaigns and the new «boosted» ones (with all the tweaks) were running in the auction simultaneously.
I filtered out the noise and kept only the relevant columns for comparison:
As you can see, everything turned profitable: from warmed-up customers (BoF) to cold traffic (ToF) with Lookalikes.
Pay close attention to the Frequency metrics I mentioned earlier. You can clearly see that even with significantly higher budgets, the guys were burning out the audience less (lower frequency).
I don't have data on exactly what gave which result, as all changes are running in a complex mix (we didn't do multivariate testing; the goal was profit, not science).
But +30% ROI in white-hat E-com, where success is considered just breaking even on the first touch is a monumental result!
I hope I helped someone with ideas. This case proves that arbitrage principles are universal. It doesn't matter if you run Gambling, Sweeps, or white socks — user psychology and Facebook algorithms work the same way.
Now I'm interested in applying this to advertising white-hat SaaS services with a subscription model. It seems that where startups fight with investor budgets without looking at efficiency, this approach could be a real Game Changer.
P.S. I know you’ll ask: The guys rewarded me generously. I knew I brought them money, but I didn't expect the gratitude to be so significant (I helped mostly for fun, just to test my hypotheses).
P.P.S. If you ask how the Sweeps from the last case study are doing: at the moment the article was released, typically, everything crashed hard due to VISA/MASTERCARD rule changes (some even trolled: «So, how's it going, running successfully? Haha»). Yes, in November we were pretty nervous. But by the end of the month, everything recovered and continues to grow. Maybe the storm cleared the auction of some teams that fell out of the race. So everything is fine, we keep running (plus our team expanded, so the volume increased even more).
P.P.P.S. I am always happy to help and answer when I have time in DMs @artemyaff.
But, PLEASE, no «Hi!» without the essence of the question. And no need to propose offers from yet another «best affiliate network» — we have excellent offers (read about them in the previous article). Let's value each other's time.
Profit to everyone!
