Case Study – Prepop and PPV

On 04.26.10, In PPV Campaign, by

I hate zip/email submits…there I said it. I know some people who have done really well with them but I hardly ever run them, there are just better campaigns to focus on. I do have one exception to this rule though and that is when you can pre-pop an email submit. Pre populating an offer [...]

I hate zip/email submits…there I said it. I know some people who have done really well with them but I hardly ever run them, there are just better campaigns to focus on. I do have one exception to this rule though and that is when you can pre-pop an email submit.

Pre populating an offer is when you send someone to a form (in this case an email submit) with their email address already filled out on the forum. All they have to do is hit submit! There are a few reasons I like pre-pop so much:

  • The offers usually convert much higher (they’re already filled out, duh!)
  • You can keep the email address yourself and pre-pop so you get the best of both worlds

Below is a case study of promoting an email submit.

Step 1 – Offer Selection

Ok so obviously we need to pick an offer that can be pre-populated. Most of the time, your CPA network will have a way to search which offers can be pre-populated. The way the offer is pre-populated is by adding something at the end of your affiliate link. For this campaign I chose the BrandGiveawayCentre – Free $500 Grocery Gift Card offer from Neverblue.

I know this can be pre-populated and find out how to do it by looking at the campaign details:

This offer is pre-poppable! Please add &em=test@aol.com to the end of the link.
For example: http://adserve.brandgivewaycentre.com/DefaultPage.aspx?c=5811&em=test@aol.com

If you load that URL you will see that whatever you add at the end – &em=enteremailhere gets pre-populated.

Step 2 – The Landing Page

For this strategy we need a landing page. Just like the offer page, ours should be simple and have a clear form to enter their email on. I’m not going to get into all the technical specifics of setting this up because 1) It would be beyond the scope of this blog post and 2) There would be a lot of question and I spend a lot of time answering questions in the forum already lol

If you have some PHP skills you can do this yourself, or hire a programmer to do this for you for a minimal cost. What you need to do is build a landing page with an opt-in form on it that collects the email into your autoresponder (like Aweber) and then sends them to the affiliate offer with their email pre-populated. This way you get to collect their email which you can market to over and over, and possibly get a commission also.

Step 3 – Collect Targets

For targets I chose keywords and URL’s. Some of the areas I focused on were:

  • Recipe sites
  • Parenting/baby sites
  • Food stamps/aid sites

I started with about 300 sites but only kept the ones that I needed a very minimal bid on.

Results

Without any optimizing:

$250 adspend

$165 in conversions

about 315 email addresses collected

So on the surface this campaign doesn’t look profitable. That’s ok though because I look at any conversions I got as just offsetting the cost of collecting email addresses. For this campaign I collected email addresses for about $0.27. 315 email addresses is a REALLY small list but I can market to them over and over, and with much higher paying offers. With only a few commissions from marketing to my list, I could be in positive territory on this campaign.

So instead of just promoting email submits for a $1.25 commission, get a little creative with pre-populating and see what you can do!