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 Google’s search engine results.

One thing to note is that if you’re used to self-serve and automated review ad networks like Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing, you’ll find that there’s a time lag waiting for a manual review of your campaign. Depending on when you submit it, it could be almost immediate or a day for the campaign to get approved and go live.

CPA network TriFoxMedia’s founder Josh Todd, who specializes in PPV marketing, has this advice:

• Start off with about 2,000 URLs because only a few will generate decent traffic
• Offer selection: “”either dating or mobile, but Flycell is a mess right now they lost AT&T temporarily, so probably would go with International (for now focus on Australia, Italy, or Spain. that’s my suggestion).”
• A $10/day budget is decent for testing a campaign, let it run at least a week or however long it takes to get the traffic you need to test it (at least an amount equal to the payout on each of your top few urls).

Note that the advice above is general advice, and will likely need to be tweaked for specific offers and verticals. Josh eats his own dogfood, so he’s loaded TriFoxMedia with the offers he recommends and is available via AIM when TFM affiliates need help in optimizing PPV campaigns.

–

PPV Dating Campaign: End of Day 1

Checking my campaign stats, I saw that several of the URL targets had $0.01 bids. A number had competition like $0.12 and $0.115 bids. I kept my bid at $0.01. Note that with PPV traffic, you’d want to be at position #1 to get traffic. There’s no 2nd or 3rd ad on the pop-up or interstitial.

At the end of day 1, I hadn’t got a single impression on any of my URLs. I checked with my Direct CPV affiliate manager Brett Rothenberg and was told that my URLs might be too long tail to have got much traffic.

So my next step is to harvest a couple of thousand URLs and load them into the campaign.

Some sources for harvesting URLs: organic search results from the major search engines, analytics websites like Compete, Quantcast, Alexa and from the preview data from services like KeywordSpy, SpyFu, iSpionage.

–

Direct CPV notes: Although their FAQ states “”How does DirectCPV display ads to users?
Our ads are displayed to users who have chosen to install ad-supported software. The ads displayed can be in the form of pop-ups, pop-unders, text and graphical banners, full page interstitials, contextual inline links or any other media.””, Brett has said that full page interstitials are delivered to users and a display page of 750 x 550 pixels is optimal, so you won’t have scrollbars appearing in the window. The ads are delivered via the software at LoudMo. (If you’re interested in signing up as a Loudmo pay-per-install affiliate, click here)