I will be doing another mastermind session at ad:tech San Francisco 2010. I am really excited because Jonathan Volk will be joining me to do a session on Facebook ads! The session is set up so that 1/2 is dedicated to PPV and 1/2 to Facebook advertising. We will have a lengthy Q&A session plus time at the end to visit/hang out with Jonathan, myself, and others at the session.
The mastermind I did at Affiliate Summit West in Vegas went well, and I have even more goodies to share this time. I can’t wait to hear Jonathan’s insights on Facebook marketing too!
The session will be held on Tuesday April 20th at 6pm. If you are interested you can read more detail and sign up here
If you have any questions about the session please contact me
For PPV Traffic you have the big players like Traffic Vance, Lead Impact, etc. but one network a lot of PPV marketers overlook is Adon Network.
Adon network get’s some of it’s traffic from an older application called the My Geek shopping toolbar. Adon has a lot less traffic that other PPV networks but what little traffic it does have converts very well. It’s going to be tough to get enough volume to scale a campaign to any great degree so you want to take the approach of having LOTS of campaigns.
You have several different options to show your ads;
- Banner ad
- Full page ad
- Pop-Under
- Search Listing
The most popular are the pop-unders which actually convert very well.
Some of the options you have when setting up your campaign include;
- Setting your ads to show at certain times of the day
- Setting a frequency cap from 5 minutes up to one month
- Target keywords/url’s or target by users browsing behavior
Adon is often overlooked because they don’t have a lot of traffic but it’s a great place to start with PPV or build tons of small, profitable campaigns.
I get some variation of this question a lot – “What does the future of PPV marketing look like with all these new affiliates jumping in?”.
It’s a good question because PPV has literally exploded in popularity this year. As more and more competition jump into the game, bid prices are getting higher. It seems like something that is just going to become over saturated quick right? I think that’s a very narrow way to look at things…
You see…right now a lot of affiliates have got banned from Adwords or Facebook and could never get Media Buys working just right so they are jumping on the PPV train. PPV is nothing new…it’s been around for years and will continue to be around for years. Most of the affiliates jumping into PPV are going to cause some temporary saturation, then leave either because they couldn’t make PPV work or they want to move on to the next greatest thing. This isn’t just the way it works in PPV mind you…the same thing has happened to every other traffic source that affiliate marketers jumped on. Does it mean just because we don’t talk about article marketing anymore that it doesn’t work? No way!
If you’ve been in the game long enough, you know that you just have to ride things out sometimes.I jumped into lead generation offers back in the day when they were popular. It was very competitive because everyone was getting into it. I stayed the course while people were busy getting into rebills and actually saw my margins getting better and better with less competition.
So if PPV seems competitive right now just know that a lot of affiliates are going to be dropping off this year which will leave more money on the table for you and I!
Yes I have them…lot’s of them. Anyone who sounds like they are throwing up winning campaign after winning campaign is full of it.
The offer I ran was a popular IQ quiz offer. Those are hot right? People are killing it right?
I started off direct linking and came up with a few angles to target:
- Quiz sites
- Cheap targets with a young demographic
- Music sites
For each idea I scraped together a hundred or so targets (URL’s and keywords).
I ran this offer on Lead Impact, Media Traffic, Traffic Vance, and Adon. After about $200 spent total and 1 conversion I knew I had to change something.
Next, I decided to build a simple landing page. I picked a couple more angles to target and removed the targets that I had spent a conversion or two on. I let this run for about $100 more in traffic with zero conversions and finally pulled the plug.
So what did I do wrong? IMHO nothing really…I believe it was the offer. Why? Because even on campaigns where I have the worst targets, or a really bad LP, if the offer has some potential I will at least get a few conversions.
I know a lot of people say to push IQ quizzes on PPV traffic but I have seen a lot of people in the PPV Playbook forum as well as other affiliates I know try and bomb with those offers. If you can get it to work more power to you but I’ll stick with the types of offers I know work well.
I don’t think it’s a secret that many people really killing it on CPA offers are up to ‘no good’. See, when I first started out I was doing everything ‘by the book’ and while I was doing ok… I couldn’t figure out how these other affiliates were driving so much volume. I was grouping my adgroups right, making sure my keywords were relevant, and making the best landing pages I could yet other affiliates were SO far ahead of me.
What I of course learned is that most of the people driving tons of volume/sales on CPA offers are at least a little shady. This can be anything from a little misleading to outright fraud. I have the opportunity to look at the back end of a very large offer on a lot of CPA networks and I can’t believe the crap these high volume affiliates are doing.
We as affiliates are NOT expert marketers. I know most would like to think they are but most of the big names out there hit on a niche or two and banked on that as long as they could. I’m not taking anything away from that, it’s certainly an accomplishment, but often when someones traffic source/offer, etc dies they never make anything else work.
Let’s look at some real life examples:
A while back affiliates were killing it bidding on ‘chat’ related keywords for their dating campaigns and doing a lot of volume. Now this was only a little shady because you can’t really ‘chat’ on most of these sites. Nowadays people are using porn sites & hiding their traffic for as long as they can until they eventually get kicked off the offer.
Some affiliates will put an offers lead form in a page about something totally unrelated (hiding all content from the offer page except the form). I saw one where a customer would think they were filling out an offer to help Haiti but in reality they were just filling out a CPA lead form.
People made a LOT of money off of flogs/farticles. I shouldn’t have to explain how shady this is. I’m not judging, I’m just saying fake testimonials are not exactly on the up and up.
So can you make money being a nice, well behaved affiliate? Sure! But next time you see a huge affiliate doing numbers that make your head spin you can almost be sure that something anywhere from 1-10 on the shady scale is going on.
A lot of money has been made by affiliates direct linking CPA offers with PPV traffic. The question a lot of affiliates have is when to use a landing page and when to direct link. There really is no right or wrong answer to this but I wanted to show you some offers that I think would work well, and some that might not work well with direct linking.
When to direct link or build a landing page
I wouldn’t direct link this offer https://www.cash-in-24-hours.com/
The reason being that there is a lot of information to fill out…SSN, bank info, etc. Remember that PPV marketing is interruption marketing. Someone is not sitting down ready to fill out all that information when they see your ad.
I would direct link this offer because it only requires a few fields of information.
It’s not always as simple as a short form though. Offers like this look like they would do really well but most of the time they don’t convert until the customer gets to page 3-4 of the lead field. I find that even when the offer starts out with a short form like that, it is better to make a landing page to pre-sell a little bit. On my landing pages I make it VERY clear what someone needs to do…’Click this button then on the next page enter your name and email..’. Pretend you are talking to someone who is using the computer for the first time.
This health insurance offer I wouldn’t want to direct link because the page is just kind of blah. With the colors and layout, nothing really stands out.
I would prefer to direct link this offer since it is very clear what the customer needs to do in order to get a quote.
Note – some of those offers have exit pop’s so you would need to talk to your AM about removing those before direct linking on a PPV campaign.
Spend time time looking at all the offers on Offerbuzz and see if you can find some offers that would work well with direct linking.
I get a LOT of questions about PPV traffic so this Q&A should really help a lot of people 
Could you explain how you would use the subids to track your PPV with direct linking? I want to know which keywords and which URLs are profitable and hope to do this with direct linking.
The easiest way is going to be using Prosper 202 and just setting up a direct linking campaign. Just make sure you have ‘target passthrough’ enabled on the PPV network you are using (unless it’s Traffic Vance in which case you can use %%$KEYWORD%%)
Does straight demographic targeting every actually work? and have you ever managed to get a very high traffic top level domain to convert i.e. like google.com amazon.com etc. if so how much did you manage to make from it?
Demographic targeting yes…like the example I use in the PPV Playbook is pure demographic targeting. It doesn’t always work that way but it can work really well if you find the right offer.
I do target high volume domains but never as broad as ‘google.com’ I don’t know how someone could effectively monetize that. When I go after high volume domains, I usually just bid on one URL and rotate a bunch of offers.
What’s the best way to use prosper to track which ppv targets led to an aweber email capture on your popup lp. I want to redirect and prepop an email submit after the capture, but not sure how to pass to prosper which targets resulted in a aweber form conversion.
What I do is use the tracking pixel to track opt-ins. To my knowledge there is no way to use Prosper to track pre-pops/conversions (I could be wrong).
Ive tested TONS of landing pages, and cant’ seem to get a CTR over 2%. Can you show us some examples of good lp’s and why they are so good?
That’s not bad for a PPV LP. Your CTR is not going to be very high. The main thing is getting a really good picture and having not much text on the page. I honestly never really worry about CTR on my PPV lp’s. Some of my lowest CTR LP’s are the highest converters and vice versa.
How many URL’s should I start with?
As a general rule I use 50-100. Some people do more but unless you have a large budget, it can be hard to not bleed money using that technique.
When should I give up on a campaign/how long should I test?
I find that most people actually put too much time & money into testing. I can’t tell you how many people I have seen banging their heads against a wall trying to get a quiz offer working. I usually test very small (like 2-3x the offer payout) and if I don’t see much promise I move on. Don’t keep doing the same thing over and over again…if something is not working try something totally different; new LP, direct link, new offer, new PPV network, etc. Most of my successful campagins, while maybe not profitable right from the start, showed at least a little promise early on.
I wanted to do a Q&A here so post any questions you have in the comments section or through my contact form and I will post the Q&A here for everyone to read.
With PPV traffic you can get as much as your willing to pay for really quickly. This is both good news and bad news. It’s good because you can get thousands of hits in a matter of minutes, but bad because you can blow through your entire budget in minutes.
If you decide to bid on ‘facebook.com’, ‘google.com’ or any other high volume target you need to set your daily budget low. Once your campaign starts with one of these targets you can literally blow through thousands of dollars before you can even pause your campaign.
So, how do you deal with high volume targets like this? First, you don’t want to bid on something as broad as ‘facebook.com’…I don’t know anyone who has successfully monetized something like that. The way to approach high volume targets is to pick the target first, then decide on a number of offers to rotate and test. I know conventionally we pick an offer, then try to find targets that would work for that offer. What I like to do with high volume targets is find the traffic first, then pick and offer that could match it.
You can find high traffic targets any number of ways; Aelxa rankings, Google trends/buzz, etc. Pick just one to start with, then make a list of about 5-10 offers that you think could work for that and rotate them on that one target. You can also spy on your PPV competition to see what they are up to on those targets as well.
Corey Bornmann from Affportal.com and I have decided to join forces and offer our services as one package. I am really excited about this because my forum members get access to the Affportal suite of PPV/CPV/PPC tools and his members get access to my forum for training. Affportal has some awesome URL/Keyword scrapers and Corey has some cool tools planned I haven’t seen offered anywhere else.
I wanted to talk a bit about using scrapers & tools for your PPV campaigns. See…most people will use scrapers and get the exact same results as everyone else. If you promote your weight loss offer and type the keyword ‘weight loss’ into the scraper your going to be doing what pretty much every other PPV marketer is doing.
So how do you use scrapers and still be creative? The trick is to do some brainstorming before you use the tools. In our weight loss example above it’s pretty obvious what most people would be targeting; ‘weight loss’, ‘lose fat’, etc. What you need to do is get in the head of your potential customer and think of the reasons someone would want to lose weight. This is something a lot of new PPV marketers have a tough time wrapping their heads around. It’s not really difficult, it’s just different from what most marketers are used to doing. Really quickly off the top of my head, the reasons someone wanted to lose weight could be:
- Getting married
- Going to a reunion
- Getting back in the dating scene
After coming up with a list of these ideas (and this is something no tool can really do…you have to sue your brain), you can plug these types of keywords into a URL scraper and get different results than most people.
Tools are great and can save you time but some people complain that using them gives you the same results as everyone else. If you do a little brainstorming first, you can get unique results with any tool you use.
