Many affiliates who were doing PPC have been moving over to PPV. AdWords bans, rising click prices, and more competition are leading affiliates to seek other traffic sources. Affiliates are finding the ease of setting up PPV campaigns and the volume of traffic available appealing. But PPV isn’t necessarily better than PPC. Each traffic source strengths and weaknesses.
PPC
Pros:
High quality traffic. Customers are actively seeking out your keywords which can lead to very high conversion rates.
Ability to target narrowly. You can target by more specifically by location with PPC than you can PPV.
Stability. This depends on the niches you are running but PPC campaigns can be built to be fairly stable.
Cons
– Quality score issues. It’s no secret that Google seems to have it out for affiliates. This recent round of bannings has shown us they don’t really care what you are running, or how much quality content your site has on it. Yahoo isn’t quite as strict but adCenter has been much stricter recently and that trend will continue.
– Click prices. I never really care what my CPC is as long as I have a positive ROI. It’s getting harder with PPC though, as more advertisers and companies with larger budgets move their advertising online. As a single affiliate it is very difficult to compete with a company with a large budget.
– Limited reach. I know this might sound crazy to you but Google, Yahoo, and Bing do not own all the traffic on the internet.
PPV
Pros
– Cheap traffic and lots of it. With minimum bids starting at $0.01 you can get a lot of traffic for not much money.
– Ability to target certain sites. This is kind of like trademark bidding with PPC except you’ll never get your keywords disapproved for it.
– Ability to do (mostly) whatever you want with landing pages and direct linking. With no quality score issues it’s easy to run whatever you want.
Cons:
– People don’t want to see your ad. Face it; this is a form of pop-up advertising. Have you ever met anyone that says “I love those pop-ups I get on my computer”. This is why you really have to offer them something of value.
– Bidding wars. These can be brutal sometimes. PPV campaigns can require a lot of babysitting. Unlike PPC where you can influence your CPC by getting a higher quality score, higher CTR, etc…with PPV all that matters is who is bidding the most to be in position 1. This is good because we can always be in position 1 but bad because everyone else can too.
– Limited reach. At any given time, there are only so many people who have these adware programs installed. Because of this campaigns can die off quicker than PPC campaigns.
I believe that PPV is generally a little easier than PPC but the point of this post isn’t to say PPV is better than PPC or vice versa, but rather bring to light that no traffic source is perfect. Ultimately, you should be diversified at least a little in your traffic sources so if you get the AdWords ban hammer, your affiliate income doesn’t totally disappear.
Can I come and rub lotions and oils all over your body while you make campaigns? PPV is sexy!
I think you hit the nail on the head. Now I need to find me a winner in PPV.
PPV bidding wars reminds me of the Overture days where you could see what your competitor was bidding and there were no quality scores. Ahhh, the good ol’ days…
I know…why can’t it still be so simple lol
@ Glendora Submit picture please.
I’m still relatively new to this, but IMO, when you find a good offer that converts, why not take advantage of both PPC and PPV traffic? And from there, build a decent website around it and work on SEO traffic also. Build your mailing lists. This seems to be the best way to build a long-term internet business. Using one strategy is a fine way to make money, but it seems like the money is too short-term.