Tag Archives: traffic vance

5 Things I Hate About PPV

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1. When People Press “Make My Bid Highest” on TrafficVance

Like I said in another post, this is the absolute dumbest thing you could ever do. Every time you hit that button on TrafficVance, you are raising the bid price by 5x higher of an increment than is necessary. There’s nothing worse than logging in to check my targets and seeing that I have been outbid by $0.005, because I know exactly what caused it. Stop the madness now!

2. Waiting for Ads To Be Approved

It can be very frustrating waiting for your ads to be approved by the PPV network, especially with Lead Impact. At least with TrafficVance or DirectCPV, if you are very impatient you can hit up your rep and tell them to approve it. With Lead Impact though, you are stuck waiting for up to 72 hours or longer. That makes me pull out my hair.

3. A Great Converting Target with Barely Any Traffic

There are lots of little gems out there in the world of PPV targets. Great URLs and Keywords that convert like white hot fire, with an ROI of over 1,000%. The only problem is they only get one or two views a day. There is absolutely no way on earth to fix this, but they are always there tantalizing you with the promise of ridiculous profits.

4. PPV Networks Don’t Allow Download Offers

Before you start jumping down my throat, yes I know that some PPV networks somewhere do allow some download offers. But my favorite ones still like to deny my favorite kind of download offers: the very profitable ones. So that leaves me either trying to run some lame download offer that maybe might work, or running with a lesser PPV network that maybe might work. It’s not worth the hassle.

5. Bid Prices Can Be Ludicrously High On Competitive Targets

It’s no secret that PPV isn’t the cheapest form of traffic on the planet. Even at the minimum bid of $0.01 per view on TrafficVance, you are still paying $10 CPM. That is a very high price in the world of display advertising. But when people start bidding $0.40 or more per view on a target, you are talking about a $400 CPM. That is insanity! That’s not to say that there aren’t some offers that could still be profitable at a bid of $0.40, it’s just that a lot of times these bids are driven up by people who are losing money hand over fist and have no idea what to do about it.

So there you have it! My list of 5 things I hate about PPV. Be sure to take these all with a grain of salt, because as I’m sure you know, I love PPV. It’s my favorite type of traffic and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But if I could have 5 wishes come true for Christmas, it would be to change these things.

The Big 5 PPV Networks: A Comparison

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A lot of people that are just getting into PPV ask me what PPV network they should use or what’s the difference between the different networks. I decided to put together a handy comparison chart here so you can see which one is the best for your particular situation.

PPV Network Comparison

PPV Network Comparison (Click to enlarge)

Right-Click here and “Save As” to download the chart!

Scaling Campaigns With PPV

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So if you’ve been following this little series of posts on marketing CPA offers with PPV, then hopefully you have setup a few campaigns, tested some things out, and perhaps even found a winning campaign or two.  I consider it a winner when it is profitable at all.  It might be making $100 a day or $10 a day, but you are in the black.  So what’s the next step?  Today we are going to talk about scaling your campaigns with PPV.

scale imgThe first step is going to be checking up on your results from the tracking that we have installed.  Before we scale a campaign we want to make sure to “trim the fat” from your initial group of keywords.  Using Prosper202, we have been tracking exactly which keywords / URLs your traffic has been coming from, and most importantly, which ones are converting for you.  My rule of thumb is pretty simple: I like to spend at least the amount of the offer’s payout per keyword / URL before deciding if it is a winner or a loser.  Now this can be adjusted depending on your tolerance for losing money, but if you’ve got an offer that pays $20 per lead, and you kill a keyword at $10 of spend, then you might be losing out because even if you spend $18 to make $20 it’s still a profit.  At times, if you are convinced that the campaign will be profitable but you are still tweaking your Landing Page or something, you can spend 2x the payout if you wish.  It’s up to you, I’m just giving you a good place to start.

Typically, what I find is that the #1 URL (the one getting you the largest amount of traffic) is not going to be profitable.  This is not a rule, it’s just a trend I’ve noticed on my campaigns.  For example, I was running a dating campaign and noticed that over 50% of my ad spend and traffic were coming from Match.com, but I hadn’t received a single conversion for that URL.  Since I had spent more than the payout (which was around $3), I paused Match.com.  The day after that my traffic went down drastically, but my conversions stayed about the same.  Guess what that meant?  That’s right, this campaign went from the red to the black overnight.

Once you have trimmed the fat, you are going to want to find more traffic for your offer.  There are two ways we can scale a PPV campaign.  The first one is obvious, to try to find more URLs.  This definitely works, but it can be more time consuming because the whole process starts all over again.  The easiest way to scale a profitable campaign is to copy it over the the other PPV networks.

Unlike PPC, where you know that if you are on Google you are hitting roughy 70% of the market by advertising there, with PPV each network has a different user base.  Zango, for example, installs their software when someone downloads a free Screensaver program, a toolbar, or some other PC tool.  On the other hand, TrafficVance installs their software when users play games from the GameVance website.  Do you think that those user groups are going to have some different people in them?  Absolutely.  This is why I would recommend unpausing all of your “losing” keywords and starting the trimming the fat process over again with each new PPV network.  Just because a URL didn’t convert on Zango doesn’t mean it won’t convert on TrafficVance, and vice versa.

Since there are five major PPV networks, this is going to give you lots of places to try out your campaigns until you have a good sized profitable campaign going.  Once you have done this, it’s time to start all over again and find a new winner!

Now go make some money.