February 2010 archive
After running for about 14 days, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions about the PPV test campaign I ran, especially some conclusions which may be a revelation to you if you’re new to this form of traffic.
[Note: this is the last in a series of case study posts, to catch up, go to the beginning: PPV-to-CPA case study kicks off]
End of campaign stats:
Assigned daily budget: $10/day
Total views: 627
Total spend: $7.47
Average daily spend: $0.30
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Total number of conversions: 0
Net profit/loss: -$7.47
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The offer as previously mentioned was a dating offer, specifically one of the niched forms of dating. It didn’t convert. Here’s why:
- I loaded 6,000+ URL targets from scraping search engine results, bidding between $0.01 to $0.04 per impression. I was pretty surprised I was getting traffic from some URLs with a competing $0.12 top bid.
- The higher traffic URLs were from the root domains of broader/more generic sites. The niche-specific domains get less traffic (about 10% of the total impressions). So a more general dating offer might have worked, especially since I was getting traffic from the other dating membership sites, a couple of About.com pages, ustream.tv, the Billboard.com charts, and a couple of general chat/discussion sites. Looking at the pages more closely, it clear that although these pages might have a chance at conversion, most of them were clearly way off-topic and would be better off pruned.
- If you looked at some of the URLs I was bidding on, you would probably be ROFLing. I didn’t go through the list, although I have a clear idea of the URLs I want to prune before starting the campaign.
- Direct linking was probably a bad idea, especially given the interruptive version of PPV/contextual traffic. Spending a couple of hours or bucks farming out engaging/eye-catching graphics as Finch has mentioned in his shock marketing tactics post would’ve increased user engagement. Even something like a pre-qualification poll, asking a question with a yes/no response (maybe with some geo-location/localization script) would have upped the user engagement, vs the likely scenario of a “Skip this ad” button click
- On the subject of creatives, Lorenzo Green (a really sharp young dude from NZ) has been churning out some great posts since he was finally pushed off the edge and started his blog (outing a lot of media buy and ppv tactics in the process). Check out his “Pimping your PPV” page post. He’s also in the process of starting a case study documenting how he’s promoting the worst performing offer he can find on the CPA networks. It’s going to make for some engaging reading. Make sure you get your vote in for which offer he should promote.
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What’s next for the case study?
- I’m planning to install the various PPV ad serving applications on my test PC – vomba screensavers, gamevance, loudo, and the like, and look at some of the creatives that’re being served up. Unlike PPC, you can’t easily preview ads unless you have it installed in your machine.
- Think up new angles to promote offers, especially given the interruptive/disruptive nature of PPV. Like Finch says, you don’t exactly have the same user behavior when you pop a 750×550 page, as when they’re typing “flip video coupon code” into google.
- Keeping at it: Labelling PPV as ineffective if you’re used to PPC or SEO traffic is just silly. You need to work at the system. Looking at my Direct CPV referrer stats, some of you guys are spending $100/day in the network. It obviously has to be working. So if it’s already working for someone else, then why not you?
Here’s my thoughts on (more…)
So Finchie has a running tagline on his blog that says “If you are a newbie CPA affiliate marketer who doesn’t really understand what I’m chatting about but wants to, I have a “Guide to CPA Marketing” ebook coming out in December. Contact for details.”. The problem is since this first appeared on the blog last year, one would expect it to have come out Dec 2009. It’s now nearing the end of Feb 2010, and still no sign. Maybe he meant Dec 2010. Or even Dec 2011. Who knows.
In any case, experienced affiliate Jonathan Volk who bought a house last year, mainly off the back of his proceeds from Azoogle campaigns, has decided to expand his brand from merely the affiliate blogger game, to the affiliate product owner space with the release of his new affiliate marketing guide.
Will this make you a thuper, duper affiliate? Will you be buying your own house in June this year off of CPA commissions, following Jon’s recipe of 11 secret herbs and spices, wrapped in a sesame seed bun? Not likely, unless you include some elbow grease and long hours into the equation.
In any case, his guide gives you a couple of tips to get started, and he’ll be organizing a series of free webinars (the first will be a PPV webinar, I’m guessing by either AffPortal’s Corey Bornmann or PPV Playbook’s David Ford), but you’ll have to be on his list to find out.
There’s also a referral contest and the 2 marketers who send the most leads through their lists will win Apple iPads, plus another iPad will be given away in a random drawing. You need to be already on his list to join in the referral contest.
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On to the content:
Here’s a listing:
Affiliate Marketing 101 Guide:
Section 1. Introduction
Section 2. What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Section 3. What Is An Affiliate Network?
Section 4. Recommended Affiliate Networks
Section 5. How Does All This Come Together?
Section 6. The “Pregame”
Section 7. The “Pregame” Pt. 2 – Know Your Demographics
Section 8. The “Pregame” Pt. 3 – Setting Up Hosting / Domain Name
Section 9. Setting Up A Simple PHP Redirect
Section 10. The Landing Page
Section 11. Affiliate Marketing Methods (Basic Overview)
Section 12. Social Media Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 13. Pay Per View Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 14. Pay Per Click Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 15. Media Buying Affiliate Marketing Guide
Section 16. After Your Campaigns Are Ready To Launch
Section 17. Conclusion
I didn’t get any specific $100k/month tips from reading the content, although I got a few ideas for some of my existing campaigns.
To download the guide and join his referral contest, go to the: Jonathan Volk Affiliate Marketing Guide download page.
CPA network TriFoxMedia, which has been around for less than a year, has just announced that they will be closing down the network at the end of Feb.
Founded by affiliate and affiliate manager Josh Todd, the network is closing down due to “circumstances beyond its control”.
Separately, Josh told me “i’m sick of all the stress and paperwork of running a network and I’m looking forward to doing affiliate campaigns again”
We hung out quite a bit at this past Affiliate Summit West and Josh is a cool guy. I guess he’ll be blogging more regularly at his InsideAffiliate blog and have more time to try out some of the PPV and social network advertising we’d been talking about in recent months.
All the best, Josh!
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In the meantime, if you’re looking for CPA networks to join, be sure to check out my affiliate network review page.
It’s been about 7 days since my PPV (pay per view) campaign on Direct CPV has gone live and I’ve some analytics data which will help me refine the campaign.
Note: If this is the first time you’re reading about this series, you might like to start at the first post “PPV Case Study kicks off”
I’ve got about 6,900 URL targets in the campaign and have received about 300 impressions. Thanks to the offer rotation in prosper202, the impressions are being fairly evenly rotated between 2 dating offers – one at a $4 payout and another at about $7.50 – both are direct linked campaigns.
With PPV, marketing costs are relatively cheap – total damage has been about $3.50 for 300+ impressions. On the downside, I don’t have a single conversion yet, however, the purpose of this case study is intended to be instructional first and profit-driven second.
At $0.01 an impression, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that $3 and up offers would do well. You need to gradually dump the losing URLs out over time (once you’ve achievied statistically significant impressions, else they’d drag down your bottomline.
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Bid Management
Although the minimum bid is $0.01 and they go up in half cent increments (eg: $0.005), it’s clear that some URLs are involved in bidding wars, eg: $0.15 per impression or higher in some cases.
So you can either go in with a higher bid and test that traffic, or you can bid on the same URL on another network. I’d go for the second option, but since this is a small scale case study, I’ll harvest the URL and place it in my spreadsheet for now (You are tracking your campaign, right?).
The major pet peeve I have with most of the PPV network interfaces is that (more…)
Update: to get a discount code for PPV Playbook, click here: PPV Playbook discount code (Limited quantities).
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It might not have been a good idea to go with 50 URL targets for a newer PPV network like Direct CPV (use code BR25 to get a free $25 ad credit). Still it’s worth a test, especially since I hadn’t bought traffic from there before.
[Note: check out the first post in this PPV case study series at: PPV case study kicks off]
So the next step was to scrape more related URL targets and load them into my PPV campaign. My URL targets were in pending status when I submitted them and were approved a couple of hours later. That’s one change you need to get used to, especially if you’re used to the algorithmic review with campaigns going live within 15 minutes that you’d experience with Google AdWords.
Now we’re at 6,090 URL targets and impressions have started clocking. I’m leaving everything at the default $0.01 bid for a day, and likely moving bids up to the $0.02 or $0.03 range if it looks like a decent URL. At this point, I haven’t reviewed every URL I’ve submitted, because I’ll let the system do the testing for me.
Besides Google’s organic results for the keywords and the keyword research tools, analytics sites (Compete, Quantcast), reading FAQs or Wiki entries related to your niche will trigger off more keyword ideas.
Also, take note that the style I’m running this campaign, it doesn’t make sense to login every couple of hours. I’d rather let the campaign build it’s data and check every 12 or 24 hours, especially on the sales conversions.
If you’re not already pass sub ID data to your tracker (ie Prosper202), you’re going to be at a loss if you get a conversion.
Next stage in the process, bid management, URL expansion.
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I also dropped PPV Playbook‘s David Ford a list of questions which he answered in the midst of launching his new PPV123 training series together with co-creator Corey Bornmann.
Question: I’ve known you to be a PPC marketer and you’ve branched into PPV/CPV. Was
there a signficant reason for this? (google slap? diversification? etc?)
David Ford: My Google account has never been slapped actually. I still do PPC but I see it getting more and more difficult with slaps, merchants outbidding affiliates, and odd quality score issues.
Over the last year I have seen Bing trying to become more and more like Google. Not just in the market share sense, but in slapping affiliate campaigns. I think there is still a lot of money to be made with PPC but it is going to continue to get a lot more strict.
Question: What’s the biggest difference with PPV vs PPC, SEO? (in terms of marketing strategy, lead quality, conversion ratios, marketing costs, etc)?
David: PPV is going to have a pretty low conversion rate compared to PPC. That doesn’t mean anything bad really because you have to take into account how little you are paying (hopefully) for your views.
The strategy is a little differen’t also; PPV campaigns require a lot more babysitting (until a few tools I know of are completed) and bid adjusting than PPC campaigns. They can also be a lot shorter lived unless you set your frequency caps correctly and have a solid strategy for expansion in place.
PPV traffic is obviously (more…)
Going through the resources listed in the kickoff post in this series “PPV Case Study Kicks Off“, I logged into one of a several CPA offer databases (take your pick of Offers202, Offer Vault or AffSpy), and looked for dating offers. As I was repeatedly reminded by numerous affiliate managers, with Valentine’s Day at the end of this week, it would be the big bang for dating offers (it’s not just flowers and chocolate campaigns, friends). As luck would have it, one of the offers hit their cap in the last couple of days and has been redirected to another offer.
Having got the offer links, and checking that I had the correct structure to embed Sub IDs in my links, I loaded them into my installation of Prosper202 (you can also use Tracking202, T202 pro, the Magic Bullet System, or any other conversion tracking system of your choosing). I loaded 3 similar dating offers into the link rotation, so they could compete against each other, then went about harvesting PPV targets.
With PPV and specifically Direct CPV, you can create 4 types of campaigns:
- URL-based (triggered via a string appearing in the users address bar)
- Keyword targeted
- Category-based
- RoN (Run of network – ie: you’re buying traffic on every user that Direct CPV has a reach into)
Starting small, I set up a URL-based campaign and loaded in the list of 50 URLs I had researched.
These were medium to high traffic URLs that I had harvested from (more…)
