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 they’re primarily web-based (although bulk uploading of campaign targets via Excel, CSV or delimited text files are available). Even if there might be an API or desktop-based client, it’d have nothing on AdWords editor. So sorting through a couple of thousand targets, checking their bids via your browser is no fun. One possible way to get around this is to get a copy of Seth Turin’s UBot (a scripting/automation tool for Microsoft Internet Explorer), or code your own using greasemonkey/imacros or some other Firefox add-on combination. Experienced affiliate Jonathan Van Clute has created a UBot script that logs into the Adon network frequently to check the bids for highly profitable PPV targets and adjust the bid upwards to maintain his first position (2nd position gives you very little traffic).

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Data: The chicken or the egg?

You might have an itch to login to your PPV account every hour to check the number of impressions. Personally I’d think that the conversion data at your CPA network’s more meaningful. And since possibly as little as 1% of internet users have adware that displays PPV creatives, you shouldn’t be surprised if you aren’t getting a lot of traffic, unless you’re running campaigns on every PPV network. Even in those cases, you might sometimes be competing against yourself, as “superb affiliate” Lorenzo “Mr Green” Green kindly points out in “PPV Networks Uncovered“. Be sure to check out the rest of the MrGreen.am blog, cos Lorenzo has a lot of good shit stuff especially if you use PPV and media buying in your campaigns. Now if only we can get him to shut up before letting too much good stuff out of the bag…

Next Step

Since the campaign is still pretty new, I’ll likely look to bump bids up to my threshold (likely about 3-4 cents per impression) if I’m getting bumped out of position #1. At this point I’m not keen to bid $0.12 to $0.15 per impression just yet.

Also, if you’re pretty serious about using traffic from one or all of the PPV networks, I’d suggest you get an old laptop or desktop (they’re about $100-200 at a swap meet if you don’t have an old one lying around) and install all the software that serves up the PPV creatives). Ask your PPV network rep about the software, then install it.

Disclaimer: Do not, I strongly advise you not to install the games/screensavers/toolbar on your work computer, in the odd chance something goes wrong and breaks your PC (as I happily lost email from 2007-2009 a couple of months ago). If you do so and someone logs into your internet banking account and wires $370,000 to Azerbaijan, it’s all on you…

Till next time.