Tag Archives: ppv

To Direct Link or Not To Direct Link?

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It’s one of the oldest questions in Affiliate Marketing: to direct link or not to direct link? Google made their stance on the issue pretty clear when they all but banned direct linking on AdWords. Now they don’t even like so-called “bridge pages” which lead to affiliate offers with little content on them.

But still, traffic sources such as Facebook and PPV still allow for direct linking. I get asked almost every single day whether you should direct link a campaign or create a landing page for it. Unfortunately, there is no hard and fast answer. The truth is (and has always been) that some campaigns work better direct linked and some work better with landing pages. Neither method works better all of the time. You need to test it out.

That being said, a strategy that I have seen work well for affiliates is to direct link a campaign to quickly evaluate whether or not it has potential before they go to the trouble of building out a landing page. Especially if it is in a brand new niche that you have not promoted before, where you don’t have any creatives or landers sitting around ready to be used.

It’s easy to throw together a direct link campaign on PPV or Facebook. Run some traffic to it, and if you are getting enough conversions to break even, or even just under, it’s a good sign that the offer has some life to it. That’s when you can buckle down and put together a landing page to bring the ROI into the black and start making money.

 

Targeting Campaigns By Demographic

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A popular technique is to target your campaigns with demographics. This is easy to do on Facebook, and it can be done on PPV as well with a little bit more work. Here is a basic strategy to get you started.

1. Go to Quantcast.com

2. Enter the url of the offer that you are promoting (such as “match.com”)

3. Click the Demographics tab from the left hand menu

Now if you are doing Facebook marketing, you can take this info and put it directly into your targeting for the campaign. Age, sex, etc. For PPV, you need to figure out what kind of sites that people in your target demographic also like to visit, then you bid on those urls. Here are the steps for that.

Quantcast Planner

Quantcast Planner

4. Go to Quantcast.com/Planner (this will require you to register a free account if you don’t have one already)

5. On the left menu, under “Audience Definition”, put in the demographic info that we learned from the previous steps.

6. Under “Filters”, click the empty box labeled “By Category” and then choose a relevant category from the list. (You must do this or else you will end up with a bunch of junk urls like google.com and facebook.com)

7. Click “Download”.

Now you have got a list of demographically targeted urls that you can use in your PPV campaign. Keep in mind that targeting demographically is not quite as accurate as targeting by keyword, but there can be a lot more volume. If you know that you campaign appeals to people within the demographic, it’s just a matter of building the right kind of landing page and/or finding the right offer that appeals to them. The good news is that if you get one of these to work, the rewards can be huge.

5 Things I Love About PPV

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After I wrote my post called 5 Things I Hate About PPV, some people asked me to write about what I love about it. So here it goes.

1. You Can Bid On Anything

Any keyword or website that exists, you can bid on it. There is no other traffic source that allows you this type of freedom. For example, if you want to advertise on Wikipedia.org, you can. There’s no ads on it, so you can’t buy media on it and Google can’t serve AdSense on it. The only way to do it is with PPV. This allows you to get really creative and think outside the box with your campaigns to break away from the pack.

2. There Is Less Competition

Even though PPV has been one of the most talked-about and blogged-about traffic sources of the last couple of years, there are still far fewer advertisers utilizing it than PPC or traditional Media Buys. Less competition means more inventory and lower bid prices for the rest of us.

3. You Can Direct Link All You Want

Direct Linking has been all but impossible on Google for a long time now. This makes it hard to throw up a quick test campaign and see how an offer will convert. Even though usually Landing Pages beat out Direct Linking in the long run, it is definitely nice to have the option. I always split test a Direct Link versus a Landing Page to see what does better for each offer. You can never be sure until you try it.

4. Incredible Freedom With Your Ads & Creatives

It is super easy to get your ads approved. The only reason they disapprove ads is if they have prohibited content (see the Terms for your PPV network). There are no character limits, or size limits on images (other than the size of the entire browser window that pops). This means you can do things you can’t do on any other traffic source. On Google or Facebook you are limited to a short headline, a short description, and a tiny image (on FB). With PPV you can make the entire ad a big image with all the words you want on it and make the whole thing clickable. You can also add audio and video, which is unique to PPV as well.

5. There Are Less Copycat Advertisers

Even though there are now tools available that let you spy on some PPV campaigns, there is still way less copycatting going on than on practically any other traffic source. On Google, Facebook, Plenty of Fish, or anything else I can think of, you can just go to the site and see the ads that other people are running. This is why dating ads are so often copied on Facebook and then re-submitted ad infinitum (see what I did there?). It is still quite difficult to systematically spy on PPV campaigns, and you will have things run for much longer without getting copied.

How To Cherry Pick The Best Offers For PPV

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This is a guest post by the UK affiliate sensation, Finch. In case you’ve been living under a rock, he blogs at FinchSells.com. I can honestly say he is one of the smartest guys in our industry. Do yourself a favor and add him to your RSS reader ASAP.

Hello Victim

There’s only one serious problem I’ve found with PPV marketing. It offers too much freedom.

As an affiliate marketer who’s accustomed to working within the confines of what a Facebook intern deems acceptable for publishing, taking the leap to PPV can be a little daunting. I’m so used to covering skin in my dating ads, or being careful not to call out user attributes, that I don’t always know what to do with a clean slate. I’m like a starved kid in a sweet shop when I sit down to ponder the possibilities.

I think many affiliates are in the same boat. We know PPV is one of the few remaining advertising platforms for our last generation ads. But without imposing any strict limitations on the affiliate’s campaigns, it can be hard to find a starting point.

If you’re looking for the motivation to get stuck in to PPV, you obviously need to select an offer first.

As a guy who’s established a reputation for working heavily in the dating niche, I regularly get asked if I promote dating offers on the main PPV networks. The answer is yes, but very selectively. It’s not as easy to promote dating with PPV for one simple reason. You have very primitive control over your demographic targeting.

A lot of experts in the field will tell you that demographic targeting is as simple as taking your ass to Quantcast, running a few searches, pretending to soak up the information and then launching the same campaign you had in mind anyway. Well, nice work if that’s the case. You really should have been a scientist.

My problem with using even the most sophisticated demographic analysis tools for a dating offer is that the percentages are still against me. Even if 75% of the audience on a given URL is male and single, 25% is a huge waste of eyeballs. PPV can be a cheap marketing vehicle, but don’t let anybody fool you. For a niche like dating, it’s NEVER as cost-efficient as a well planned CPM campaign.

The secret to success with dating ads on PPV is to take one of two paths:

1. Only targets URLs and keywords where you have sufficient assurance that the large majority of users are going to be in the boundaries that are accepted on your offer. Here’s a tip, hot shot. Don’t go trying to promote an offer like Mate1 25-30 year old female users only. You’re digging your grave by narrowing the goalposts.

2. Produce creatives that are unisex, suitable for most ages, and targeted to most needs. If you’re going to target a broad selection of URLs, you’ve got to be able to pop a creative that captures and hooks as many of the demographics as possible. Now there are ways you can do this. My personal favourite is to capture the user’s information, rather than sending them directly to an offer. Use a dropdown box to allow the user to select his/her age then perform some quick PHP “if else’ing” behind the scenes to match said user to an appropriate offer.

The third option would be to avoid dating ads altogether. And this is actually what I would recommend for most newbie PPV marketers.

In my opinion, the easiest way to succeed with PPV is to work with niche offers where the user’s demand for a solution is at the “ready to buy, just get rid of my damn problem” stage.

We could use the recent bed bug repellent offers as an example. Now I don’t live in America so I can’t honestly report whether my sleep has been disturbed by bugs in the night, or whether it’s as big a problem as the international media has made out. But from my understanding, bed bugs are becoming a pain in the arse across the pond.

The reasons I would choose something like a bed bug repellent for a PPV campaign are three-fold.

1. Where there’s a demand, there’s an affiliate marketer. If somebody thinks they have bedbugs, they’re going to flip out and buy something in a hurry. Nobody wants their blood sucked from them in the night. Not even Finch is that kinky. So it’s the kind of campaign where you really don’t have to do much work to inspire the user to whip out a Mastercard. Target, fire, reload. Just the way we like it.

2. It’s pretty easy to target the users who are actively searching for a solution. How many other reasons do you have for Googling pages about bed bugs? It’s not something I’ve been forced to add to my LeechBlock.

3. The offer is not tied to demographics. The beauty of bed bugs is that they’ll bite the crap out of anyone. It’s an affiliate marketer’s sweetest dream! We should be welcoming them in to our neighbourhoods with open arms. No more demographic targeting. The only targeting you need is “Hello, Victim… Want To Stop Itching Tonight?”

I’m using pretty niche examples here, but the idea is simple. The best way to deem an offer’s suitability for PPV is to weigh up those two important factors. Is it an impulsive buy? And more importantly, can you guarantee enough interested eyeballs from your targeted URLs? If you’ve got no control over your demographic, you’ll become a sucker of your own creative license. PPV offers a lot of freedom. But it makes no sense to lack discipline with your efforts. This is a platform that punishes bad marketers and sloppy marketing.


PPC Is Dead, Long Live PPV

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It’s funny to see the different cycles that affiliate marketers go through when it comes to traffic sources. One thing will be hot for a while, then it’s dead and the next big thing is the only way to make money. As you know I personally love PPV and use it to promote things every day. But whatever happened to that old stalwart of traffic sources, PPC?

I work at an affiliate network, and I know from experience that there are very few affiliates running PPC these days. It’s true that Google hates affiliates, for the most part. They made it extremely hard for people to make money on their platform. There are some people running offers on Google, but certainly a lot less.

Steampunk iMac

This steampunk iMac has nothing to do with PPC or PPV. It's just awesome.

So why am I bringing this up? It may be time to take a second look at PPC (yes the title of this post is sarcastic). I’m not saying to drop PPV, but there is still lots of money to be made on Google and also Bing/Yahoo. These are some of the largest traffic sources in the world. Their sheer volume trumps all the PPV networks put together. It’s going to take more work. You will have to build quality landing pages and deal with the possibility of a Google slap. But for those who persevere, the rewards can be great.

Don’t count the PPC engines out. They aren’t down for the count just yet. While the majority of affiliates have moved on to greener easier pastures, that leaves a lot of inventory out there for the open-minded and experienced affiliate. Go get it.

CPV Lab: Tested and Reviewed

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CPV Lab came out a month or two back, and you couldn’t read a blog that had anything to do with PPV or CPV marketing without seeing an ad or a review for it.  I read through a lot of them and they just went over the features that it had, but nobody had actually run any campaigns with it yet.  I decided to hold off on my review until I used it as my main tracking solution for PPV campaigns for an entire month.  So what’s the verdict?  Read on…

The install process for CPV Lab was relatively painless.  Just upload it to your server, enter your MySQL database into into the config file, and run the installer script.  Pretty much the same process as Prosper202 or any web-based script.  After logging in, I did get the overall feeling that CPV Lab was designed to be lightweight and quick on its feet.  There is not a lot of flashy interface design here, it is just the important info that you need to see quickly and it loads fast.  I like that about it.

The six different campaign types in CPV Lab

The six different campaign types in CPV Lab

Setting up the first campaign with CPV Lab was a breeze.  All you do is paste in your affiliate link and/or landing page URL, and tell it how you want to rotate things.  I haven’t even been able to dive in deep and try all of the advanced campaign types that this thing allows, but the primary Direct Link / Landing Page campaign type works like a dream.  You can just set up one direct link campaign, or rotate several.  You can set up one landing page, or rotate several.  But then, you can rotate multiple offers on the backend of each of those landing pages.  And you can also split test the landing pages against the direct link offers (one or many), all at once.  And you can choose the weight for each of these rotating factors.  If you want to test one at 10% and one at 90% of the traffic, CPV Lab has you covered.  Mind = blown.

Offer Rotator

The weighted offer & landing page rotator

Once you set up the campaign, you get your link and put it in your campaign at the PPV network and you are good to go.  It has several pre-made variables set up for the dynamic keyword insertion tokens for each network, so that makes it easy to get the subid tracking working correctly.  All of this went pretty much as I expected, although I was definitely impressed by the number of rotation options.  But the true beauty of CPV Lab doesn’t reveal itself until you actually have traffic live and running.

In PPV campaigns, you have to change things a lot.  This is a pain because you have to get your page re-approved by the PPV network with every change that you make.  At least that’s how it used to be.  The #1, awesome, truly amazing thing about CPV Lab is that once you create your campaign, the tracking URL never changes!  You can add and remove offers & landing pages, change rotation weights, and make any changes you want to the campaign without ever having to get re-approved by the PPV network.  This is a massive time saver, and worth the price of admission by itself.

After you’ve got enough traffic to start analyzing the stats, CPV Lab shines again with its built-in optimization features.  It will automatically highlight winning and losing targets and keywords on your stats page, based on metrics that you set on the settings page.  If you want to consider every keyword that has more than a 25% ROI a winner, you can do that.  If you want to make everything that has received more than 100 reviews without a conversion a loser, you can do that.  The options are limitless.  This takes all the guesswork out of optimizing your campaigns and lets you focus on creating new ones.  It will also show you Time & Day trends so you can set up day parting.

Trends Chart

The time & day Trends chart

You can track conversion in real time with a pixel, and it fires much more consistently than the P202 pixel ever did for me.  To get the actual cost data in there, you can upload the reports from your PPV network as often as you’d like.  This allows you to calculate the proper cost per keyword, not just for the campaign overall.  This was another thing that you couldn’t do with P202 for PPV campaigns.  If you are paying $0.20 a view on one URL and $0.01 a view on all the other ones in your campaign, you better be dang sure that you know the difference when you are looking at your conversion stats and optimizing your campaign!  CPV Lab does this beautifully.

Bottom line, if you run PPV traffic, you need to get CPV Lab.  It will make you more productive, help you optimize your campaigns, and save you so much time doing it you will be dumbfounded.  I know this review might come out sounding like a sales letter, but I have never been so impressed with a piece of software in this industry, ever.  Not to mention there are new add-ons coming soon to work with Facebook, Plenty of Fish, etc.

Do yourself a favor and buy it now.  If you buy through my link, I would be more than happy to help you with any CPV Lab questions or troubleshooting that you need.  I also am good friends with the creator, Robert Matthew, so if I can’t answer your question I’ll get it straight from him.

Bottom line: CPV Lab is amazing.  You are losing money by not using it.  I have used it personally on every PPV campaign for the last month, and I will not be going back.  Ever.

Disclosure: http://cmp.ly/5

Size Matters: PPV Landing Page Dimensions

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As I’ve written about before, you need to get their attention in 4 seconds or less when you are doing PPV.  A huge part of this has to do with your landing page.  If you are direct linking, you need to pay special attention when selecting offers to make sure that the call to action and all the pertinent info is appearing in the viewable area of the pop-up browser window.  If it’s not, there is very little chance the users are going to scroll down just to see what the deal is.  If you are building landing pages, you have absolute control over the size and appearance of your page.  This is probably the #1 reason that people make landing pages for PPV, besides getting people more excited and getting them clicking.

One question I get all the time is how big to make your pages.  It’s common knowledge that the pop-ups generated by PPV software are an 800×600 window.  But does that mean that you should design an 800×600 page?  The answer is NO.  I grabbed screenshots of some actual pop-ups spawned on my two favorite PPV Networks, TrafficVance and Lead Impact.  I’ve diagrammed them below so that you can see exactly what is going on.

Lead Impact Pop-Up Window

Lead Impact Example

Click Image for Full Scale Version

TrafficVance Pop-Up Window

TrafficVance Example

Click Image for Full Scale Version

First we have the actual browser window, which is definitely 800×600.  However, that measures from the outside of the window.  The actual viewable area is much smaller.  As you can see below, the TrafficVance window has 35 more pixels of height to work with in the viewable area than the Lead Impact window does.  This is because of the extra space that the Hotbar toolbar takes up in the Lead Impact window.  Is it retarded that Lead Impact leaves the Hotbar app in the window that it pops?  Yes.  It’s the stupidest thing ever.  But that’s the way it is.  Weird thing is, when I took the screenshot, the Hotbar magically disappeared from the picture.  It just shows up as a blank toolbar.  Interesting…

Not only does TrafficVance have a larger true viewable area, the Adware Disclaimer is also a lot smaller.  It’s just in the bottom left corner of the screen instead of a big blue bar all the way across the bottom like Lead Impact has.  The other major factor to keep in mind when comparing these networks is that TrafficVance only pops a maximum of 4 windows per day.  On the other hand, Lead Impact will pop on almost every single website that you visit.  This gets really annoying, even for me while I was doing the testing.  I can’t imagine how people leave it installed on their computer all the time…

So there you have it.  I always find that when going into battle (and marketing is a battle), it helps to have the best intelligence you can.  Now you know exactly what dimensions to design your landing pages in, or to double check that your direct link offers fit into.

Pro Tip: If you want a really easy way to measure how large the landing page is for your affiliate offer, just download ScreenHunter Free and set it to “Rectangular Area” in the “Capture What” menu.  Then hit whatever key you setup to be your capture key (I use PrintScreen), a box will appear around your mouse that zooms in the detail.  Just click and drag to highlight the landing page and it will tell you the dimensions.  If you want to go ahead and capture the screenshot, just let go of the mouse button.  If you don’t want the screenshot, just right-click before you let go of the left mouse button.

Uber Pro Tip: ScreenHunter is only for PC users.  But Mac users don’t need it because they already have that same function built-in to OSX.  Just press Command + Shift + 4 then you will be able to use the same type of rectangular box to measure your page.

Don’t Push “Make My Bid Highest”. Ever.

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If you are reading this right now and you are a PPV marketer, we need to come to an agreement on something.  I know when it’s late and you are about to go to bed, it can be tempting to log on to TrafficVance and hit that shiny “Make My Bid Highest” button just to make sure that you are getting all of the traffic.  Too bad.

evil button

Every time you push that button, you are just handing money to TrafficVance or DirectCPV or whatever network you are using.  See, it doesn’t just automatically figure out the least amount that you would need to bid to get the #1 spot, it overbids it.  A lot.  Like 5 times more than you could have been paying.  It only takes $0.001 (that’s a tenth of a cent) to outbid someone.  But when you hit the evil button, it raises your bid by $0.005.  That makes TrafficVance happy, but it makes us pay too much money.

So let’s all just agree right now to take the extra 30 seconds it takes to log on, check the rank for our top keywords and URLs, and add $0.001 instead.  That is all.

Instantly Increase Your ROI By 2%

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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.