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 (Click to enlarge)
I know what you are thinking. A measly 2% increase? What’s the point? Ask anybody that is making six figures a month with Affiliate Marketing if they’d like an extra 2%. Of course they would! That’s an extra $2,000 in their pocket every month. Sometimes in life it’s the little things that add up.
Possibly the most annoying post image ever
This trick only works with PPV. And it only works with a couple of networks: Lead Impact and Media Traffic. All you need to do is go to the Billing/Funding page in your account and switch on Automatic Funding. This means that when your balance drops below a certain threshold, they will automatically charge a set amount to your credit card to refill your account. For doing this, they will give you a free 2% bonus on the amount you deposited.
It’s free money, sweet and simple. If you are worried about your card getting charged unexpectedly, just pause all your campaigns when you are getting near the threshold. You can keep them on pause indefinitely until you are ready to run again.
PRO TIP: If you use a credit card that gives you cash back, you can get another 1% back for free on all of your traffic purchases on any network.
If you’ve read my other posts on PPV, you know I’m a fan of Media Traffic and their PPV network. This is the place that 90% of the people I talk to start out with PPV. That being said, there are other options out there. A newer network that I heard about recently is DirectCPV. Since I had a few people asking me about it, I decided to give it a test run to see how it stacks up to the other guys.
First of all, the interface may look familiar to you when you log in and setup a campaign. This is due to the fact that DirectCPV is white labeling the CPView platform. This does not mean that DirectCPV is the same thing as CPView, they have a different user base with the adware installed so it is a completely different network.
It is relatively simple to get a campaign set up with the interface, you put in your Landing Page url (affiliate link), give it a name, and then you add in at least one type of targeting (URL, keyword, or category). I put in about 20 URLs from a quick Google search and decided to try out a couple keywords as well. One thing to note here is that DirectCPV does not have anywhere near the number of adware users that some of the bigger networks have, so you might be a bit safer testing out new keywords here (keywords on the big networks can mean your whole budget gone in the blink of an eye).
I let it run for a few days and when I came back to check my stats (using Prosper202) I was pleasantly surprised that my campaign was profitable right off the bat. It wasn’t a home run, but it did make money. I decided to make a couple of minor tweaks at that point. The first thing was checkout my Prosper202 to see what URLs were converting. As is often the case, all the conversions were coming from one URL. I noticed that some of them were coming from the Keyword that I had put in instead of the direct URL. The problem with that is that the bid price for the Keyword was 0.08 (8 cents) and the bid for the direct URL was 0.01 (1 cent). Simple fix there, I paused the Keyword and added the URL to my targeting. After that the profits were decent.
The main gripe I have about the DirectCPV interface is that you have to click “Check Bid” on each URL individually to see if you are in 1st position. Other networks have done this better, but you can take some of the hassle out of it by setting the bid mode to Auto and then setting it at 1st position. This will automatically increase your bid if somebody is above you. Also if you want to Geo Target your campaign, you have to do it after the campaign is setup, you can’t do it during the campaign creation. This stumped me the first time.
Final word? I like DirectCPV. I think it’s worth a shot especially if you have a profitable campaign on another network that you are looking to expand. It can also be good for testing out a new campaign to if it converts without blowing your budget since there is a smaller installed user base, there is less competition, and the bid prices start at 1 penny (at MT it is 1.5). It doesn’t have as much traffic as the bigger guys, but from what I saw it can definitely be a good source to add to your repertoire.
If you signup through my affiliate link here you can get a $25 credit by using the promo code “BR25”.
Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5
Edit 12/21/2010: The information in this post is outdated. For an up-to-date and complete guide to setting up your PPV campaigns with Prosper202, download my free eBook, “PPV 101”.
Edit 07/27/2009: Prosper202 has added native support for Media Traffic, so this method is no longer necessary to run with MT. Feel free to use it for other networks that don”t yet work correctly with P202.
First off, let me say that I am a huge fan of Prosper202. Whether you use the self-hosted Prosper202 version (my preference) or the online Tracking202 version, this is one of the greatest tools to come along in affiliate marketing in a long time. Although it was designed primarily as a PPC tool, as PPV is gaining more favor with affiliates it is becoming more and more essential to track which URLs are converting for them.
The tricky part is deciding what is the best way to setup a campaign with a PPV network using P202. With PPC, using the Big 3 Search Engines, you can use the dynamic keyword insertion function to make it easy. Zango and Media Traffic do have a form of pass-through, but I haven””t been able to get it to work correctly with P202 because it passes extra variables along with your keyword/URL.
The method that I use may seem cumbersome, but it””s actually not too bad with a couple of free tools. What I do is create a unique destination URL for each URL that I am targeting on the PPV network. By doing this, I can make sure that the keyword/URL info is precisely as I want it to be displayed in P202. When you setup your campaigns on P202, it will give you a link like this:
yourdomain.com/tracking202/redirect/dl.php?t202id=4459&t202kw=
You will need to add the URL or keyword that you are tracking at the end of the URL after “t202kw=”. You can do this manually, which can take quite a while if you are doing 1,000+ URLs at once, or you can make it easy.
First, download John Hasson””s JAH Simple PPC tool. It is a very handy little program, and it looks like this:
It is designed for creating a large number of long tail keywords with just a couple of clicks, but we are going to use it to create our destination URLs. Just take your P202 link and put it in List A in JAH Simple PPC. Then, take your list of URLs that you are targeting and put it in List B, then hit Generate Keyword Combinations. Now that we have our list, we need to get them uploaded to the PPV network.
With Media Traffic, you will want to download their Bulk Upload Form. Once you have the form, just hit Copy Final KW List To Clipboard in JAH and then paste it into the Destination column in the MT form. Next, copy the list of URLs that you used in List B (JAH) to generate your tracking links, and paste that into both the Name column and the Target column in the MT form. The Name is just an internal reference for MT, so I use the URL as the name. Next you set your bid price (just do the first couple then copy it down to all of them with Excel).
Once that is all set, you upload it into your new campaign at Media Traffic, and you are good to go! If you are using Zango, you will need to use their Bulk Upload Form. Be sure to bookmark this link, because there is no way to get there directly from the Zango interface.
Now that you can track your URLs, it’s time to make some money.
Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5
We all know that landing pages are a very important part of PPC marketing, but it is important to realize that they can have a huge effect on your PPV (Contextual) campaigns as well. It seems like most people that start PPV are just doing it to direct link. It is quite attractive to forget about all the variables except the offer and the URLs you are targeting, but you might be hurting yourself in the long run by doing this.
For example, I was experimenting with a ringtones campaign on Media Traffic. I had about 1,000 URLs setup for my targets, and I decided to just start with direct linking by grabbing my Contextual Affiliate Link for the campaign (it was Ringtones.net at affiliate.com). It started getting traffic immediately after I set it live, and before the day was out I had about 1,000 views (displays) on the offer. To my dismay, there wasn’t a single lead showing!
What I didn’t realize initially is that Media Traffic only displays a 750 by 550 window for your ad. Once I tested it, I realized that with the smaller window size a good portion of my ad was being obscured. No wonder it wasn’t converting very well, they were only looking at half of a landing page! I asked my account rep, and he confirmed that 750 by 550 is the max for MT as of now. They are considering going to 800 by 600 (like Zango) sometime in the future.
This was what led me to create my first landing page for a PPV campaign. The main reason was so that I could control exactly what was being viewed by the user when my ad pops up. For starters, I made sure that the LP I created was exactly 750 by 550. There would be nothing obscured this time. Also, with PPV you don’t have to worry about putting a bunch of arbitrary text on the page, because there is no Quality Score issues or “User Experience” to worry about. The results to my initial LP were very promising. I put it up on Friday night, and by the end of the day Sunday I had generated a 20% profit. Not too shabby for the first try.
I quickly realized that one of the other benefits to having an LP is that you can tell how many people are clicking on your ad and determine your click-thru ratio. If you are just direct linking to the Contextual link then you will lose all your click data, and impressions and leads alone are not enough info to tweak your campaign for the maximum profit. On my page for example, I found out that I was getting about a 2.3% CTR. The next step would be to play with the ad copy & images on the landing pages to get a higher CTR. For PPV, it needs to be something eye-catching so they don’t just immediately close the window when it pops up. Consider what page they are going to be viewing already when the ad pops up, and consider modeling it after the design of that page.
Whatever you do, testing is the key. The right ad, displayed to the right people, is what creates a killer campaign. Now go make some money!