Tag Archives: traffic

Breaking Down Your PPV Campaign

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So you’ve scraped several hundred urls, you have launched the campaign on at least one PPV network, and you have traffic coming in.  What now?  Well, chances are you are not going to be profitable right off the bat.  If you are then, great!  But there is still optimization that can be done.  If you are just under the line, even about -50% ROI, you can probably pull it up into the black with a little adjustment.

A lot of times you will find that out of those several hundred urls that you scraped, only one or two will give you the majority of the traffic right off the bat.  If it’s a site like google.com or facebook.com that slipped in there by accident, then you should just pause those.  But if it’s a site that is related to your niche that gets a ton of traffic, then it is time to break down your PPV campaign.

Breaking down the wall

Here’s what I mean by that: take out that #1 url, the one that is getting the most traffic, and make a new campaign just for that url.  Then, you want to create a landing page that is specifically targeted towards users of that page.  You want to match the style of it and the colors as well as you can, so that it feels like a natural extension of the site they are visiting instead of an intrusive popup.

If you can achieve this, you are bound to see a large increase in your click-throughs and hopefully conversions as well.  There are still no guarantees, but this method is one of the best ways to optimize your campaign and either get it profitable or squeeze even more profit out of it.

Give it a shot, and let me know how it goes!

Day Parting & Campaign Caps with Zango

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Have you ever been testing out a new PPV campaign with a budget of $25 a day and found that it’s all used up before 5pm?  This is one area that PPC withGoogle AdWords has spoiled us: you can choose whether you want Standard or Accelerated ad spend, and with Standard it will evenly price out your clicks through out the day.  Most PPV networks do not do this.

Today I noticed that with Zango you can actually do day parting, which is choosing which hours of the day you want your ads to be displayed.  I wouldn’t necessarily recommend turning this on right away if you are testing a new campaign, but it certainly is handy if you are blowing through your daily budget without getting any conversions.  In many verticals, it is not until the evening hours that they really start converting.  People are home from work, kids are home from school, people are surfing the net without worrying about the boss looking over their shoulder.  Besides, it’s more likely that the home computer is where the AdWare client is installed anyway.

To do this in Zango, just login to your account, click on the campaign name you want to add day parting to and click Edit Campaign.  Right above the Save Changes button you will see a new link called Advanced Options.  Click this and it will pop up a window with all the different days of the week and hours of the day.  You can also turn specific days of the week off, like if you only wanted to run your ads during the weekend.

Along with day parting, there are also Campaign Caps on this menu.  This will let you set a daily budget for specific days which overrides the Campaign-level daily budget.  This is great if you are finding that certain days provide a large amount of conversions, and you want to crank up the ad spend to take advantage.

It may not seem like much, but little tools like this can really help you optimize your campaigns and squeeze every last bit of ROI out of your PPV traffic.

PPV Network Review: DirectCPV

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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

Amazon Says “No” To Twitter Links

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As more and more affiliates are trying to figure out how to monetize Twitter, one of the largest affiliate programs on earth has decided against it.  Amazon is refusing to pay affiliate commissions on clicks generated from Twitter, citing a clause in the TOS that states that the clicks have to be generated from “your site”.  Since Twitter is not your site, the clicks are invalid (at least according to Amazon).

This seems like an odd move to me, and it”s an even odder move if it becomes a precedent for other websites that will no longer be accepted as legitimate traffic sources.  What does this mean for affiliates that use 3rd party adservers or tracking software so that all the clicks appear to come from a different site than their own?  Will Amazon only be allowing affiliates to place banners on their websites instead of the RSS methods that we have enjoyed up until this point?

I”m assuming that Amazon must have received a bunch of complaints about the links in Twitter as people were tricked into clicking by their “friends”.  This is not really any different then when CPA advertisers declared that they would not accept traffic from MySpace or Facebook messages, bulletins, updates, friend spamming, etc.  There were major lawsuits filed against several companies including Media Breakaway, parent company of affiliate.com.  I suppose it is best if Amazon pulls the plug now instead of waiting for things to get ugly and bringing out the lawyers.

So bottom line, if you have a nice auto blog setup with an RSS feed to your Twitter account, you better pull the Amazon links from it ASAP or you are just burning money.  As far as I know, you can still post eBay Partner Network links, RevTwt links, and CPA links.

It”s not quite back-to-the-drawing-board yet, but it is definitely a sign of things to come.

Tracking Your PPV Campaigns With Prosper202

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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:

JAH Simple PPC

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