Why You Should Be Using PPV

About Guest Poster:
Josh Todd is an Affiliate Manager at 365 Ad Solutions, serial internet entrepreneur, musician, gamer, and armchair film critic. As an internet marketer, he has done everything from creating niche stores to sell products on eBay Partner Network to promoting CPA offers in competitive verticals such as Ringtones and Dating. As an Affiliate Manager, Josh has helped dozens of affiliates realize their full potential and grow their part-time hobby into a full-time business. For more PPV tactics, check out Insideaffiliate.net.

Over the last year or so, PPV (also known as Contextual or CPV or Pay per view) marketing has been gaining traction among affiliate marketers looking for a new traffic source to test out. The more that Google continues to dominate the PPC marketplace, the easier it becomes for them to snuff your business out in a single algorithm update if you are relying on them for 100% of your traffic. The concept that separates the men from the boys these days is diversity.

So why should you be using PPV?
Quite simply put: less competition, lower bid prices, and higher return on investment. Bid prices for a view (or display of your website/landingpage) can run as low as $0.0150 (a penny and a half). Furthermore, you are not limited to a single network, there are 5 major PPV networks out there right now. They are Media Traffic, Zango Ad Services, Traffic Vance, AdOn Network, and Clicksor.

Each network is going to have different traffic, since the downloadable software that powers PPV advertising is going to be installed through different programs and toolbars. They each require a different deposit amount to get started with. I would recommend that you start with Media Traffic and/or Zango, which require a $200 deposit to get things going. You are still able to set a daily budget just like with PPC networks.

Tracking:
The biggest shift in your thinking with PPV is that you are going to be targeting specific URLs instead of keywords. There are literally billions of URLs out there, and you never know what is going to convert. A typical PPV campaign is going to have several thousand URLs in it. The most important thing to do when getting started is to set up tracking. I recommend Prosper202 for your tracking needs, but feel free to use whatever solution suits you best. If you want a starting point for testing out URLs, I would recommend spending an amount equal to the payout of the offer you are promoting on each URL. If the payout is $10, then spend $10 on a single URL before you decide to pause it.

One of the main advantages that you are going to find over Google AdWords or Facebook is that there are very few restrictions in PPV advertising. You don't have to worry about Trademark Bidding or Direct Linking issues. Also, there is far less competition with PPV. On most of the PPV networks, you can see what the person in the top ad spot is bidding, and you can hit one button and bid for top placement on all of your URLs.

A major key to success with PPV is offer rotation. You want to make sure that you setup your PPV campaigns with an address that you control. If you are direct linking, make sure that you iFrame or PHP Redirect your affiliate link so that you can swap it out for a different offer if it isn't converting. You want to make sure that you are rotating your offers, either manually or with a rotator script, because one offer may convert great on PPV while another sucks, even within the same vertical (like Dating offers).

For those that have tried PPV in the past with no success, it may be time to implement some more advanced tactics. One idea is to create a landing page that mirrors the design of the site that you targeting. The more that it looks like an actual part of the website, the better this tactic will work. You can use your LP to send people to a different offer, or even the same offer as the one that is being advertised on the target website. Order page bidding is another advanced tactic that you can use to laser target your traffic. What better time to pop your ad up in front of them then when they have their credit card out and are ready to buy or sign up?

At the end of the day, it is all about testing, more testing, and then testing some more to make a profitable campaign, but when you have a winner it is going to payoff big time. If you have never tried PPV, now is the time!