Mar 25 2009

Why You Should Be Using PPV

  • (14) Comments. Got a say in it?
  • Published March 25th, 2009 in Internet Marketing by Jonathan Volk
Learn the techniques I used to make over $4,000,000 in affiliate commissions! Check out my Free Affiliate Marketing Guide and learn the "how to" for Facebook Ads, PPC Affiliate Marketing, PPV / CPV Affiliate Marketing, And Media Buying!

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!

  • (14) Comments. Got a say in it?


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14 Responses to “Why You Should Be Using PPV”

  1. alex says:

    Thank you for your sharing.

  2. adam says:

    I am thinking of getting into ppc/adwords again but theres more hype about ppv. should I try it instead of ppc?

  3. Jon,

    How do you get the list of 1000s of URL in your niche.

    I gave on PPV because I couldn’t get traffic. I had couple urls to test from but its a pain to get a list of 1000 of urls. How do you get your list?

    -G

    • Jon,
      Finding URLs isn’t really that hard. Look for a free tool called Adwords Digger to locate sites within a keyword-specificed niche.

      @Jonathan Volk; Another quality post on a good quality blog. :)

  4. Great post, I’ve been thinking about ppv, now I’ll definitely try to use it

  5. plunge says:

    People promoting affiliate offers should take care to make sure that the network/advertiser they’re working with is OK with ppv/”software” traffic. Many networks specific disallow this in their ToS.

  6. Christopher says:

    Wait, pay per view. Can you seriously get 0.015 a view?

  7. nick says:

    The shit thing about rotating offers and order page bidding and promoting the same offer is that when the ppv networks go back and check up on your campaigns you end up getting them shut down. And then banned.

    Been there done that

  8. You really did convinced me to go for ppv. Thank You!

  9. I’ve never used PPV before. Has anyone else ever used it and had any success? Still wondering whether to use it or not.

  10. The contest is still runing and I’m Late to know about this informations.

  11. SJones says:

    What if I havea site set up for reviews of all my offers. Can this still work as a landing page or should use direct linking or just redesign each offer

  12. Benhuebner says:

    Thanks for this informations. This is the first useful information about this topic in half an hour google search. Nearly all other spots before you in google are about mass ppv traffic…

    Thanks again!

  13. Be careful with bidding on PPV networks. You will find that they will charge you the maximum bid you place, not just a bit above the next bidder like in Google Adwords. That means one person could be bidding 1 cent and the next one bids 5 cents. Only 2 bidders. But if you want to be number one you have ot bid at least 5.1 cents. See my point. So always reset yoru bids to lowest value them place bids again. That way you dont drive up PPV target prices to high. The PPV networks like this bad form of bidding as it makes them more money in the short term.

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