Profitable PPV Campaign Case Study
So in honor of getting added to Affbuzz (Thanks Justin!), I thought I would do a post showing step by step exactly how I set up a profitable PPV campaign.
First, if you don’t know what PPV traffic is let me give you a brief explination:
One of the PPV networks I use is Traffic Vance. Traffic Vance gets its traffic from users who have downloaded and played games on Gamevance.com. Once users have installed the Gamevance software, they are served ads from the Traffic Vance system when they visit a URL or search a keyword you are bidding on. So, if you are promoting a dating offer you might bid on a URL like singlesnet.com. When a surfer who has the Gamevance software installed visits singlesnet.com, your ad will be popped up.
There is a common misconception that this type of traffic comes is spyware. This is simply not true. The people who have this software installed on their PC have agreed to install the software which enables them to play games, get screensavers, etc. in exchange for viewing ads. The correct term for this software is called adware. Another misconception is that these ads won’t show due to pop up blockers. Through the technology used, these ads will show regardless of whether the user has a pop up blocker installed or not.
Ok, now that we have that out of the way I am going to break down a profitable PPV campaign I ran.
Step 1 – Offer Selection
I wanted to select an offer that had a short lead form. You can promote different types of offers with PPV traffic but to get per sale offers to work you have to use a couple tricks of the trade (which I’ll cover in later posts). I like lead offers because they don’t require the surfer to do much (like pull out a credit card). Remember, we are interrupting their normal surfing and they aren’t actively seeking our offer. Because of this, we have to hit them with something that is easy to complete.
With that in mind, I went to Neverblue and selected their “Quote Wizard – Auto Insurance” offer. I know this offers accepts PPV traffic because under ‘promotion allowed’ they list ‘DLS’ which is their name for this kind of traffic.
Step 2 – Landing Page or Direct Link?
After visiting the offer page I decided I was going to direct link. I liked this offer because because it required only minimal information from the surfer. With PPV networks there are no duplicate destination URL rules, quality score issues, etc. so direct linking is not a problem. I do like to use landing pages for more advanced techniques, to collect emails, etc. but for this campaign, I thought direct linking would work best. I will do a future post specifically about landing pages for PPV traffic.
Step 3 – Collecting URL’s
This is where the fun begins. With PPV networks you can (most of the time) bid on site URL’s or keywords. Then when someone visits that URL, or searches a keyword your ad is shown. Most of the time I like to start by targeting URL’s because they usually convert better. I add keywords only when I have a profitable campaign I want to scale. I’m not saying that the right or wrong way to do it, that’s just my personal style.
So where do we find sites (URL’s) to target? Basically anywhere we can find a website or ad is fair game. Let’s start by gong to Google, Yahoo, and Bing and typing in our search terms then collecting URL’s to bid on. Your probably asking yourself what keywords we are going to search for by now right? Most everything you read about PPV will tell you to search terms directly related to your offer. If we followed that advice we would search Google for “car insurance” and come up with a list of URL’s like this:
progressive.com
geico.com
etc
Now that seems all well and good but I am here to tell you that it NOT the best way to do it. See…that’s what everyone else is doing. If you were to bid on geico.com you would end up paying a high CPV (cost per view) and when you think about it…geico isn’t really all that targeted. Why? Well think about this…someone clicking on the Geico website is looking to get a Geico can insurance quote right? Do you think they are going to appreciate getting a Quote Wizard pop up? They are either going to close your window or get frustrated at which lead form to fill out (yours or Geico’s) and close both windows.
We need a better strategy than this, so I thought for a minute….What types of people need car insurance? After thinking about it, I came up with a cool idea…people shopping for new cars. People buying new (or used) cars always need new insurance or to make changes to their existing policy right?
With this idea in mind I went to Google and typed in the phrase “Ford cars” and came up with a list like this:
fordvehicles.com
ford.com
ford.reply.com
harrold-ford.net
etc
You want to take URL’s from the natural search engine results as well as the AdWords results. You can repeat this search on Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine. Our goal is to find a bunch of different URL’s. I’m going to do a future blog post about all the other places to find URL’s but for the sake of this case study I just used the search engines. You’ll notice I didn’t include any ‘http://www.’ in my collected URL’s. This is because on PPV engines they usually just want the domain and .com, .net, etc.
I started out with 50 URL targets. Why that number? Basically I knew that would be enough to get some traffic and see if this campaign had some potential. Once I get a campaign near break even or profitable I will add as many URL’s as I can find in batches of 50-100, weeding out the ones that don’t convert.
Step 4 – Time To Launch
Now that I have a direct linking strategy in mind, and have collected some URL targets..it’s time to make my campaign live. I launched this on Traffic Vance and Media Traffic but you could run this anywhere. Setting up a PPV campaign is very simple; you simply add your destination URL, keyword or URL targets, and launch. I always make sure I am in position 1 with my bids. This isn’t like PPC where you can still get good traffic being in the 2nd, 3rd or 4th position. On PPV networks the highest bid will get the vast majority of the traffic. This is good news and bad news. It enables us to see other bids and be in first position just by bidding higher, but of course that leads to bidding wars. It’s not uncommon to log in and raise your bids multiple times per day when you have a PPV campaign running where there is lots of competition. In this campaign I was bidding anywhere from $0.01-0.08 to be in position 1.
I’m going to get into tracking in a later post but you basically have a couple options when it comes to tracking PPV traffic. Use Prosper (you will need a dedicated server just because of the sheer amount of volume PPV traffic can bring), or simply use your affiliate link with a sub id appended to it to. I will get into this more in depth in another post.
Results
I let this campaign run 1 week and along the way added some URL’s (I searched for more car dealers, car review sites, etc). I also kept raising my bid on keywords to be in position 1 as often as possible.
At the end of the week I had spent roughly $140 in traffic which resulted in 37 leads @ $12.75 per lead for a total of $471.75 leaving me with a profit of roughly $331.
I was pretty happy with that this campaign but I can think of a few ways it could be improved:
- Using dynamic keyword insertion and a landing page so I could say “Attention Ford.com (or whatever URL I was targeting) Customers, Get a free insurance quote today”
- Expanding my URL target list by searching for more car dealer sites, used and new car review sites, car magazine sites, etc.
I hope this gives you a good idea of how to put together a profitable PPV campaign. I really only scratched the surface in this post to give you an idea what is possible. In future posts I want to cover topics like landing pages, tracking, other places to find URL targets, and how to automate a lot of this.
Let me know what you think!
Pretty fucking BOSS
Good Post
Keep up the work
Great post. Hard to find these kinda posts every body recommends and try to make money. Keep it going. Gives a greater insight to the newbies.
Well done, David. Case studies are becoming rare these days. Thanks for sharing.
Hi David,
just wondering if you optimized that campaign during the first week you ran it as it’s a really great ROI. I’m guessing not as it was only a week?
Dave
Hi Dave,
Yes, I did optimize a bit – I added some URL’s, adjusted bids, and deleted non-converting URL’s.
Hey David,
Great post! I completely agree on no low payout email/zip submits. Unfortunately, I had to learn that the hard way.
Sorry, I was just wondering something. At what point do you decide not to bid on the root URL? I had one root URL target with over 1 million monthly visitors and I got very little traffic. On the other hand, I had another root URL target that had about 450k monthly visitors and the views took off like a runaway freight train.
Well, just because a URL has a high traffic volume it doesn’t mean that people who have Gamevance, Vomba, etc installed are visiting that URL
If I am in position 1 and not getting much traffic and no conversions I usually let it go until I have spent a couple commissions without seeing a sale.
I guess that means the only way to know is to test, test, and test some more.
Hey David,
Thanks for the case study. Just bought your guide. Hopefully i’ll have much success like you on my first try
Great post, David. I just found your site via AffPortal and, I have to say, you have some fantastic posts here. thanks a ton!
I love to read articles that are informative, Thanks again for a nice site
Now I know why so many people love this site, nice contribution. Thanks
Another amazing post.
I am very impressed by this blog.
I had fun reading this post. I want to see more on this subject.. Thanks for writing this respectable article.
I’m lucky to find this blog. Great case study and I learn a lot…
What is the best tool to scrape urls or keyword research that you can recommend?
I tried this with the same offer and related car urls but i could not turn a profit
Hi Dave ,
I will like to know if you have any software that i can purchase and use to track non-converting URL’s Please .
Hey I suggest using Propser
David is my friend and I am down here in sunny San Diego. I am a personal chef and I netted almost $200 and only spent $28; almost 1,000% ROI in my first week of CPV Marketing I haven’t even implemented David’s advice I can’t wait to test out some of theses new ideas that David explains.
You Rock Man!!
Hello David,
I have a question about “How are you detecte that URL\KW not converting?”. I saw you response for the one answer:
“If I am in position 1 and not getting much traffic and no conversions I usually let it go until I have spent a couple commissions without seeing a sale.”
Does it’s mean for each URLs\KWs or for a whole campaign?
Best Regards,
Vitaly
I must say I am more and more amazed with internet marketing on account of watching the way in which the youger generation interact with the outside world with technology. My 14 year old son just took me a web system they had developed to aggregate teenage topics for their group of friends. They were interested in knowing a way to generate some advertising on the system to . I am so poud.
This is awesome information. I only just got introduced to PPV today and was searching for as much info as I possibly could. Your info is right on and the basic info I was looking for is all there in your personal case study. I definitely will be looking forward to your future posts. I will be checking out the PPV Playbook.
This is what I call being in the right place at the right time.
Cheers.
Great post to start my PPV learning.
thank you very much!
I noticed that the bounce rate on my web sites is pretty high – for most visits it is 100%. I think my content is relevant to the keywords I’m found for. What do you believe may be the difficulty?. What exactly is a normal bounce rate for you?! Help !