CPV Lab: Tested and Reviewed

Posted on October 27, 2010 by Josh Todd

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

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.

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.

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

AffExpert > AffPortal (A Review)

Posted on May 26, 2010 by Josh Todd

AffPortal was the first “PPV Tools” website on the block. It took a whole bunch of tasks that PPV marketers have to do on a regular basis, and made them faster and easier. Things like URL scraping, etc. Now that it’s been out for a while, a competitor has sprung up called AffExpert. At first I was skeptical, because I am a huge fan of AffPortal. But once I got the chance to dig in and use the tools during their free Beta period (which has expired), they won me over.

Most of the tools are self-explanatory by the title, but there are a couple of things that I really like about AffExpert’s system that make it unique:

When you are scraping URLs, it automatically shows you the Alexa, and Quantcast rankings for all of them. This is pretty cool because you can tell how much traffic a target is going to get before you even test it out on the PPV network.
There is a really cool Basket system that you can save all the URLs to that you want to keep, and then download them all at once in one nice file. This eliminates the all-too-common problem of duplicate URLs you get when you are scraping through other methods, and it will also give you the option to add or remove the final slash (/) at the end of the URLs. Since PPV networks like DirectCPV consider “domain.com” to be a different URL than “domain.com/”, this can be handy.

URL Scraper in action

Here are the PPV/CPV tools available:

Related Keywords
URL Scraper
Site Analytics (Alexa, Compete, Quantcast)
Domain Expander
Related Domains Finder
Top 1 Mil Domain Explorer
Domain Typos
URL Query Generator
YouTube Scraper
URL Follower

There are also some PPC tools:

Google Campaign Builder
Competition Spy
Adsense Finder
Keyword Grouper

There is also a self-hosted Weighted URL Rotator. You can install this on your own server so you don’t have to worry about the data being snatched by somebody else (unless they have access to your server, and then you are just a moron).

I haven’t personally used the PPC tools much, so I can’t report on how they work. That being said, it’s nice to get them for the one monthly fee, and if you are paying for another keyword tool that does the same thing, you can eliminate that extra expense and just use one tool set for everything.

All in all, I highly recommend AffExpert. I use it personally on every PPV campaign I do, and it is a major time saver. You can get a 7-day, fully functional trial for only $1, so what are you waiting for, give it a shot!

P.S. Use promo code “BETAUSER” to get a discounted membership for life.

Linkshiftr – Like Bit.ly With Brains

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Josh Todd

URL Shorteners have become ubiquitous in today’s social-media-crazed internet world. Marketers have even begun using services such as bit.ly to cloak their affiliate links and make them more attractive. I recently discovered a new service that is actually directed at marketers, it’s called Linkshiftr. It has a pretty cool set of tools that you can use to experiment with your links, almost like a Prosper202 lite. Here are some of the features:

Variable Passing – You can pass variables dynamically to your destination URLs. This will be just the ticket for marketers looking to add SubIDs or dynamic PHP variables (like keywords) onto their links. You can pass as many variables as you would like.
Weighted Link Rotator – This is something that PPV marketers especially will like. You can add multiple URLs, and then choose how you want to have them rotated. For example, if you want Offer A to be shown 70% of the time, Offer B to be shown 20% of the time, and Offer C to be shown 10% of the time, this can handle it for you in a breeze.
Conversion Tracking – Here is where Linkshiftr really sets itself apart from the competition. Services like bit.ly allow you to see how many clicks your links have gotten, but to my knowledge only Linkshiftr lets you place a pixel and do conversion tracking. This could be extremely useful for marketers that are just setting up a quick and dirty campaign to test an offer before going into Prosper202, creating a landing page and a full blown campaign.

You can try out Linkshiftr for free by signing up for an account here, but if you want to use the Conversion Tracking feature you will have to sign up for a Pro account for $9.99 per month. The free account has all the other features though, so it’s definitely still useful.

Has anybody else tried this out yet? What are your thoughts?

HasOffers: A Legit Review

Posted on September 22, 2009 by Josh Todd

Since HasOffers released their affiliate tracking platform, there has been a lot of controversy surrounding the company and the product. Most of it has been stirred up either by DirectTrack competitors or people that use DirectTrack other platforms. I thought I would pitch in my 2 cents worth since I have been using HasOffers everyday for about 4 months now. This is not a paid post, and there are no affiliate links in this post.

Campaign Setup

A lot of a network’s time is spent setting up campaigns. Besides checking Stats, it’s the one activity that I do on a very regular basis, often daily. Since I’ve started using HasOffers they have updated the Campaign Setup a couple of times and added new features, but it is still very clean and to the point. You put in the name, description, tracking link, set your prices, geo-targeting, etc. and you are good to go. There are some unique features such as browser targeting (even including mobile browsers), Campaign Groups for geo-targeting multiple offers, and allowing campaigns to convert multiple times. Most of the time I don’t use these features but it is nice to have the option. Once you have it set up and hit submit, it takes you to the pixel where you can copy & paste it to send to the advertiser, or you can just click once and have it emailed to them automatically, which is very cool. Also, it creates a test link for you which saves a lot of time.

Tracking

Tracking is probably the most important aspect of a network platform. Does it track? In a word, yes. HasOffers is very accurate in tracking conversions. The default pixel type is an iFrame pixel, which seems to work better than the Script pixels that most other platforms use. It supports 3rd party pixels for Affiliates, and on my network I have it setup so that affiliates can place these themselves with automatic approval. Also, you can choose whether you want HasOffers to track All Clicks that come through an affiliate link, or just Unique Clicks. I have mine set to All, since affiliates always complain that their clicks aren’t tracking otherwise.

Creatives

The File Manager is where you upload creatives for your offers. It runs on a CDN server, and they host all your creatives so you don’t need to have a gallery somewhere else. It supports Image Banners, HTML Creatives, Flash Banners, and Offer Thumbnails (so that a picture appears next to the offer name in the interface, similar to LinkTrust). I particularly like the Flash Banner setup, it is super simple. All you need to do is upload your SWF file, tell it what the height and width are, and it does the rest. I’ve used some other setups that are a royal pain for Flash.

Reporting

I really, really like the reporting in HasOffers. First of all, it’s fast. I can tell it exactly what information I want to see, and it displays it quickly. Coming off of using DirectTrack, the difference is night and day. I used to spend a good hour or two a day just waiting for DirectTrack to load reports. I like it better than LinkTrust’s reporting as well, which I’ve always found a bit cumbersome to use. On the affiliate side, the reporting allows them to pass a “source” variable (such as Google or Yahoo) as well as 5 separate sub id variables if they choose, and they actually work. The #1 reason that affiliates login to a network is to check their stats, and this is one area that HasOffers really shines.

Affiliate Interface

HasOffers looks and feels very different than LinkTrust or DirectTrack. Both of those systems have been around for a while, and they are starting to show their age. On the contrary, HasOffers has a decidedly Web 2.0 feel to it, with soft edges and animated bar graphs for revenue and total leads generated right on the home page when affiliates log in. It looks great right out of the box, but network owners can use their own custom CSS & logos to give it their own look. Also, a new feature was added recently to select from a variety of different Themes to change up the look with one click. I have received quite a few compliments from affiliates who are logging in for the first time, it just looks a lot fresher than the other platforms.

Last Word

I think that a lot of the venom that has been spewed at HasOffers is due to the fact that they are offering their entry-level product for free. This means that the barrier of entry to creating a network has been lowered to almost nothing. I think there is some truth to this as well as some exaggeration. A network is based on trust and relationships above all else. It doesn’t matter what software they are using. Anybody who spends a lot of time and money promoting offers from an affiliate network that just popped up yesterday and has no reputation in the industry is just asking to get ripped off. Do your homework, run with people that you trust and you will have much less risk of things going wrong.

You may have heard that HasOffers’ parent company, Adapp Solutions, is owned by the owners of Tatto Media affiliate network. This is true. Does it mean that Tatto is going to steal all of your data? If you are using any 3rd party tracking platform at all, the security of your data is a concern, but the fact is that a large part of the networks in the industry are powered by them. These service providers all put a lot of work into making sure that your data is secure, and HasOffers is no exception.

I have used both DirectTrack and LinkTrust extensively, and I like HasOffers better, hands down. Sign up for a free account now!

PPV Network Review: DirectCPV

Posted on August 11, 2009 by Josh Todd

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”.