After my last post on the idea of using PPV for local affiliate marketing, I got some emails saying how it sounded like a good idea but wouldn’t work. I am not intending this as an ‘I told you so’ post but I did want to share some success I have had using PPV with [...]
After my last post on the idea of using PPV for local affiliate marketing, I got some emails saying how it sounded like a good idea but wouldn’t work. I am not intending this as an ‘I told you so’ post but I did want to share some success I have had using PPV with local affiliate marketing.
The Client
I got into local marketing a short while ago. I started by asking a real estate agent I was working with at the time if she had ever purchased leads. She had several years experience purchasing leads from various sources and was nice enough to share her experiences with me. I got a crash course in how leads are marketed and sold to real estate agents, and how those brokers get the leads in the first place.
Initially I started off generating leads by doing PPC, SEO, and various other traffic generating methods. This was going well so I decided to try generating leads for her via PPV traffic.
The Landing Page
The client had a fairly basic real estate agents website with some listings, info about her, etc. I decided I was just going to use her website and send traffic to both her main page and contact page to see which one performed better.
The Targets
This was the fun part..getting to decide exactly what targets I would use to drive traffic to her site. If I was running a CPA offer for something in the real estate niche the obvious choice would be gathering a list of URL’s like real estate companies, etc. Targeting local affiliate marketing isobviously a little different..This client was only interested in getting leads from people in our local metro area. So, I had to decide how I was going to target sites that mostly people from our area (or wanting to move there) would be visiting. On PPV networks you don’t really have a way to target specific metro areas so the way to make it work is just to target sites people from those metro areas are going to visit. I came up with some possibilities like this:
- Other local real estate agent websites
- Local real estate agencies/offices
- local mortgage brokers/lenders
- local bank foreclosure/repo listings
And several more ideas I’m not quite ready to share yet.
The Results
The traffic was definitely there with these targets, and there was little competition. Most of the time I didn’t pay more than $0.03 per view. One could argue that this would work in a larger metro area but not a small one. The reality is that it’s going to be more difficult to drive traffic to a local business in a smaller town using any traffic source.
The quality of traffic was about on par with using PPV traffic for CPA offers. The conversion (getting someone to fill out the agent’s contact form) were fairly low but I have spent less than $100 to date and the leads are coming in. The end result is that I am making money by selling these leads, and the agent is happy with the quality of leads she is getting.
I have a lawyer client who I am doing a similar campaign for so maybe once I have more data I will post that case study. I don’t think you should only do PPV to drive leads for local clients. A better approach would be to use a combination of PPC, SEO, PPV, etc.
Hopefully this post has given you some good ideas for creative uses of PPV traffic.
10 Responses
Are you using TrafficVance for this?
Does the client know that you’re popping up her site over other sites? I’m afraid most clients won’t like that idea, because a popup might do more bad than good to a reputation. And it could piss off the competition where you’re launching those popups.
Is that why you’re suggesting a combination of PPC, SEO, PPV, …?
This is a pretty weak case study considering their are no numbers,.
I decided not to post numbers because this particular client has a couple professional situations going on where she doesn’t want that type of information made public. She has also referred a bunch of clients to me so I wanted to avoid the ‘well you sent her xxxx leads, why aren’t I getting that’.
You should do a PPV/local marketing case study..let me know if you need any help
@David
Nice food for thought.
Most realtors, insurance agents can give out 10-15% of their expect comm for completed transactions in lead gen fees, assuming they have half a clue abt marketing their biz.
I’d think $50-100 per real estate lead is decent, assuming she’d make $5-10k off each completed txn.
Pretty interesting to use PPV to gen leads, as I’ve primarily used social media, ppc for local biz leads.
@ William – Traffic Vance and a few others.
@ Benny – She does yes. It’s unlikely that many other realtors are going to have the adware installed to view her ads so it will likely go un-noticed.
@ Andrew – I’ve used social and PPC also but I’ve just started playing around with PPV local leads and it’s showing some promise so far.
Let’s be real here. There isn’t enough PPV traffic to get this targeted with it. I’ve been in PPV for a couple of years now and I’ve tried this. Never have I been able to generate enough traffic with local PPV traffic that I could make anything worth while. And why would anyone else target your traffic to drive your bid up to $0.03. Unless they were bidding on terms like “Remax” or “Century21″ and you were targeting a specific version of that url like “Remax-texas.com”. But still… There isn’t enough traffic city specific PPV traffic to get more than a couple 100 impressions from a city. And that’s the LARGE cities.
@ Chris – I am definitely no expert at local marketing. All I know is that I have been driving leads using PPV and my client is happy with what she is getting. She even just went into escrow with one of the leads she got.
Your right about bidding on things like “Remax-texas.com” which is why I am doing a lot more than that. I can’t reveal all my secrets on my blog you big silly goose!
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I have been to your site before. The more I read, the more I keep coming back! ;-P