Despite the dominance of top players like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and WhatsApp in the social networking space, niche segments such as dating and virtual social platforms continue to show strong growth potential.
According to Sensor Tower’s State of Mobile report, social networking apps saw a 29% year-over-year increase in IAP revenue, with Tinder maintaining steady growth at 13%, ranking third globally by revenue.
While the social app market remains highly saturated, the emotion of dating still presents meaningful opportunities for innovation, engagement, and monetization. For dating apps to stand out, they must identify high-value audiences, deliver compelling ad experiences, and protect campaigns from fraud.
In this article, we’ll share three practical ways dating apps can work smarter with XMP, boosting acquisition and building for long-term growth.
Types of Dating Apps and What Makes Them Unique
Dating apps today are categorized into several key segments based on user behavior and matching mechanics. Swipe-based apps like Tinder, Tantan, Bumble, and OkCupid focus on quick, appearance-driven interactions, making them fast-paced, addictive, and highly engaging.
Serious dating apps such as Hinge, Coffee Meets Bagel emphasize profile depth, personality alignment, and long-term relationships, often with higher user intent and conversion rates.
For the LGBTQ+ community, platforms like Grindr, Her, Chappy, and Lex offer safer spaces with strong identity expression and community support.
Other categories are also gaining traction. Video-driven social discovery apps, such as Azar, Ablo, Yubo, and Wink, focus on face-to-face interaction and cross-border friendships, though they often face challenges with long-term retention.
Lastly, gamified or personality-based apps like Jigsaw, Once, and Soul break away from traditional models, offering more playful or interest-based matching experiences for users who prefer deeper or more creative ways to connect.
Practical Strategies for Dating App Growth with XMP
1. Pinpoint Your Niche and Target Audience Precisely
Mainstream dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, and Grindr have already captured the mass market, making it increasingly difficult for new apps without a clear niche to stand out, especially when ad creatives lack a well-defined audience hook. Broad targeting often leads to poor performance.
With XMP’s Bulk Ad Creation feature, you can efficiently run A/B tests across multiple targeting groups to identify the unique traits of your ideal users, whether it’s LGBTQ+ communities, educational backgrounds, or specific interests. This allows you to quickly validate niche positioning, build high-performing lookalike audiences, and scale campaigns by replicating proven acquisition models.
🎯Use Case: Find High-Conversion audience with Bulk Ad Creation
One dating app used XMP to run A/B tests across various interest-based groups, such as fitness enthusiasts, young professionals, and book lovers. The campaign revealed that users aged 25–34 with an interest in personal development and weekend travel showed the highest engagement and subscription conversion rates. By tailoring ad creatives to this segment and building a lookalike audience around it, the team reduced CPA by 38% and doubled paid subscriptions within six weeks.
2. Streamline Creative Management to Deliver Diverse, High-Impact Ads
Dating ads often fall into repetitive formats: profile images, chat bubbles, and match notifications, leading to rapid creative fatigue and declining CTRs.
To stay competitive, dating app advertising teams need a steady stream of fresh, diverse creatives: emotional stories, humor-driven content, mini dramas, product reviews, and user-generated testimonials that highlight real value and differentiation. This makes creative testing and management both high-stakes and high-frequency.
XMP’s Creative Library and Tagging Report are built to streamline this process. You can bulk upload creatives to XMP, tag them by style, region, audience, or campaign timing, and manage them efficiently with batch operations.
With tagging, you can segment creatives, such as drama-style, testimonial, or UGC story, and quickly analyze which category delivers the best performance. And Tagging Report makes it easy to optimize based on real data, helping your team iterate faster and scale winning concepts.
🎯 Use Case: Optimizing Creative Performance with Tagging
A dating app targeting urban professionals aged 25–35 ran a creative testing campaign, uploading over 100 assets ranging from live-action videos and UGC interviews to animated demos and static visuals. To streamline creative management and performance analysis, the team used XMP’s Creative Library with Bulk Tagging, applying labels across multiple dimensions:
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Content Type: Story / Testimonial / Demo / UGC Story
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Style: Live-action / Animation / Mixed media
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Region: Southeast Asia / North America / Middle East
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Audience: Single professionals / Travel lovers / Content creators
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Timeframe: Black Friday / Christmas / Always-on
Using the Tagging Report, they quickly identified that the combination of UGC Story + Live-action + North America + Single professionals delivered the strongest results, achieving a CTR of 3.5% and a ROAS 52%. Based on these insights, the team increased production for that creative style, paused underperforming "animation + product demo" assets, and prioritized the high-performing UGC combinations for their upcoming Valentine’s Day campaign.
3. Secure Genuine User Acquisition with Smart Anti-Fraud
Dating apps are particularly vulnerable to fake registrations and low-quality traffic, especially when campaigns are optimized for top-funnel KPIs like installs or account sign-ups.
Channels such as programmatic networks or incentivized traffic sources can easily attract bots or click farms that complete basic registration flows without contributing to real engagement or monetization. Without proper anti-fraud safeguards, these campaigns can be exploited, damaging retention rates, skewing performance data, and wasting ad spend.
XMP’s Smart Assistant provides robust anti-fraud protection by integrating with major platform-level and SDK-based fraud detection systems. It continuously monitors for abnormal traffic patterns, flags suspicious behavior, and helps advertisers cut off fraudulent sources early. XMP's anti-fraud templates allow advertisers to set up protection with just a few clicks, while Smart Assistant actively scans and alerts the team in real time, ensuring that your user acquisition efforts drive genuine value.
🎯 Use Case: Fighting Fake Registrations
A dating app faced a surge of fake sign-ups from programmatic and incentivized channels, harming retention and wasting budget. Using XMP’s Smart Assistant, they quickly detected and blocked fraudulent traffic with automated anti-fraud rules. Within weeks, fake registrations dropped by 30%, improving campaign accuracy and enabling more efficient user acquisition.
Final Thought
As competition intensifies in the dating app space, winning user attention requires precision, agility, and meaningful connections. The path to higher ROAS and stronger user engagement doesn’t have to be a guessing game. With XMP, you gain clarity, control, and speed to move ahead in a global market. Ready to take your acquisition strategy to the next level?
About XMP
XMP is a one-stop cross-channel intelligent media buying platform dedicated to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of advertisers. It integrates global top media, SDK Ad Networks, and mobile measurement partners and enables advertisers to manage their advertising campaigns, creatives, and data across multiple channels all in one platform. Contact the XMP team today to start your journey to success!
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