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Hellopeter, South Africa’s largest online review platform, successfully partnered with Flow to monetise its substantial audience data. Doing this unlocked significant new revenue opportunities while providing unprecedented targeting capabilities for brands and advertisers.
But, how did they do it? Let’s walk you through it.
Noticing the Opportunity
Hellopeter attracts a highly engaged audience actively seeking reviews and insights before making purchase decisions.
With 72% of consumers unwilling to take action without reading reviews, and a substantial percentage actively researching before purchasing, Hellopeter and Flow recognised an opportunity to leverage this audience for targeted advertising.
Prior to partnering with Flow, Hellopeter had not yet identified a mechanism to monetise their substantial audience data in a non-intrusive, POPIA-compliant way, while remaining completely independent—a core priority for the platform.
Additionally, brands initially hesitated to explore Hellopeter’s audience due to a historical perception that the platform primarily hosted negative consumer feedback.
Today, Hellopeter’s reviews have evolved to be balanced evenly between positive and negative (50/50), compared to previous years when reviews were overwhelmingly negative (90/10). This balanced representation ensures Hellopeter remains a trustworthy, brutally honest resource for consumers making informed purchasing decisions.
Flow helped showcase Hellopeter’s high-intent buyer audience who are actively engaged in product research.
Advertisers quickly saw that engaging these high-intent audiences directly improved their performance across key metrics like ROAS, conversion rate, and customer acquisition."
The Ease of Monetisation with Flow
The process of integrating Hellopeter’s audience data into Flow’s platform was straightforward and efficient.
Flow handled all aspects of audience segmentation and integration, creating targeted audience segments based on consumer review categories such as:
- Insurance
- Retail
- Telecom
- Automotive
- Homeware
- Financial services
The ease of integration meant Hellopeter was quickly able to unlock an entirely new revenue stream, enhancing its core business without significant operational shifts or overhead costs.
This gave us a brilliant opportunity to start monetising this data. On the consumer side, it is a win as they are getting highly contextual and relevant ads and we can see how valuable it is and the success stories have been phenomenal."
The Impact for Hellopeter
The partnership has added to Hellopeter’s business model by:
- Enabling the monetisation of their extensive audience data without disrupting user experience.
- Creating a stable and passive revenue stream through data rental.
- Providing brands and advertisers with access to a high-intent audience actively engaged in research, reinforcing Hellopeter’s position as a trusted, balanced platform for consumer insights and informed purchasing decisions.
The Win for Brands and Advertisers
Brands and agencies now access a previously unreachable, high-intent audience actively researching purchases, significantly improving advertising effectiveness and ROI.
As you might imagine, this resulted in some major wins for them:
- USN, a large national sports nutrition brand achieved 3.6x higher conversions.
- A leading SA Retailer saw a 1,420% ROAS and 5.4% higher conversion rate.
- One of the major homeware brands in SA realised a 9.78 ROAS and 3x increase in conversions.
- Rain experienced a 116% increase in online purchases.
Brands Using Hellopeter Audiences
To date, 68 brands and advertisers from diverse sectors, including retail, automotive, financial services, telecom, and homeware work with Flow, and are regularly renting Hellopeter’s audiences.
Major media buying agencies, such as OMD, +oneX, Wavemaker, and PHD, consistently integrate these audiences into their strategies, further proving their effectiveness and value.
In fact, 95% of our traffic comes from users actively browsing, while 5% comes from those writing reviews. This made it a natural step for us to begin monetising this data."
The Bigger Picture: Why First-Party Data is the Future
Hellopeter’s partnership with Flow demonstrates just how valuable first-party data is. With minimal effort, it unlocked a steady revenue stream while giving advertisers an unmatched way to reach purchase-ready consumers.
In other words: brands get better results, consumers get more relevant ads, and Hellopeter gets to keep doing what it does best, connecting people with the businesses they need. Everybody wins.
