What is PPV Advertising?
I worked at a company that invented what is currently called PPV (pay per view) advertising. We created what was called CPV advertising, or Cost Per Visitor. It's the same thing, just another way to say it. We basically referred to it from the selling side and not the advertiser's traffic buying side. Pay per view advertising, as I have seen it, is referenced to adware networks that are selling you an impression from a pop to one of their users. Depending on the network you are buying from this can range from downloadable games to search toolbars. The user is ...
How to Make a PPV Keyword List
The biggest mistake you can make with creating a PPV keyword list is taking your PPC list, loading that up, and expecting any good results. With PPC you are trying to find that long tail keyword that drives you traffic at a low cost. This is more of a shotgun approach. The shotgun approach is normally tens to hundreds of thousands of keywords and that is just too much for a PPV campaign. One thing you need to realize when making a keyword list for PPV is how the software works and does keyword matches and what the limitations are. The ...
Importance of Tracking PPV Campaigns
I cannot emphasize this more...track track track! The biggest mistake you can do is to spend your hard earned money blindly and not track every single keyword you are purchasing. All PPV networks operate off a bidding system. You are bidding on individual keywords on a CPV (cost per visitor) scale. Each time your ad is shown your account is debited that amount. You need to be able to monetize each view as efficiently as possible. The only way to do this is to track by keyword. The way that you go about tracking each keyword varies, but the two most common ...
Ok, so I have used DirectCPV for the past 3 months and my reviews are a bit mixed. They seem like a small shop, so some of the kinks aren’t quite worked out like the other PPV networks out there (LeadImpact, MediaTraffic, etc.).
I have been testing CPA offers from a few of the bigger 
affiliate networks out there and really wanted to see what the quality of traffic, ease of interface, and just overall experience was with one of the PPV networks that comes up in conversations.
Initial reaction is that there web page is flashy and attractive, much more than there closest competitors. The presentation is very clear and you know exactly what you are buying. There is no question as to what the revenue model is or what your ad will look like when displayed.
Account approval was fast and my initial funds went in quickly. The one questionable thing is if you use a credit card they capture the CVV code (the 3 digit code on the back of your card). In my experience this is illegal as it shouldn’t be stored, but only used when doing a charge for initial verification. So if you are cool with a company having all of the numbers needed to make a charge anywhere on the Internet then cool, otherwise they have paypal as an option.
Even the paypal option sounds a lot better than it really is. They basically have an email address that you can “send payment to”. Within one business day the funds show up in your account, so don’t expect a streamlined ebay/paypal type process. Nevertheless, I have deposited about 5 times over the past 3 months via paypal and have never had an issue.
The campaign setup is somewhat confusing as they are broken up into either keyword or url campaigns. I haven’t quite figured out why they do this, but it must have something to do with the way their desktop client works and how it parses up the keyword lists to trigger. It’s somewhat of a pain in the ass to separate out keyword lists, but also a blessing in disguise as I would probably want to see how url’s do versus keywords anyway.
All of the homepages for the major advertisers on the Internet are already bid up into the 10 cent and higher range, but even at the minimum CPV of $0.01 you still get a trickle of traffic, which is normally good enough for testing. The nice thing here is that not all of the variations for your favorite homepages are taken so get creative with your keywords and you won’t have to bid up on the main pages. I am not going to tell you what those are, but I have several good ones which I am the only bidder on.
Keyword approval takes about 1 business day, sometimes faster. You get an email from them when your landing pages and keywords have been approved, which is nice so you don’t have to constantly log in to see what is going on. After about a month I was assigned an AM. Now I can email her and get a response back within the day.
Now once your campaigns actually start running this is where things get a bit weird. Like I said, the traffic is good and you can get some even at the minimum CPV, but for some reason they have an issue with caps. There are two specific instances I am referring to:
- Overall account spending
- Individual campaign caps
For the overall account spending, it never fails…whenever my account reaches around $25 all of my campaigns just pause. There is no indication of paused campaigns, the account itself just doesn’t deliver traffic. I actually have to end up contacting my AM to have her “turn it back on”. Very weird and somewhat of a pain in the ass in the grand scheme of things. Also, the exact reason doesn’t really make sense to me. She has said that it’s so I don’t overspend. All this makes me believe is that their systems were thrown together quickly and aren’t very good.
The second cap issue I have is individual campaign caps, specific to ROS. I have a need for a small amount of ROS traffic…basically $1 a day. You set these accounts up the same way, with a specific campaign cap, but for some reason these always blow out these caps. In some cases, I have spent 3 times the cap amount. Again, this leads me to believe that they don’t have very good systems in place.
The final issue I have with DirectCPV is that they resell their traffic to other networks. I only know this because one of my affiliate networks said that they don’t accept traffic from TrafficVance, but at this time I didn’t have anything running with them. When testing out networks, I normally keep my other stuff off. So basically, DirectCPV is charging a premium for traffic and then more than likely it becomes backfill on other networks. So in essence I may be paying premium CPV prices for ROS traffic. I am not sure if this is the case as the traffic still converts decently enough, but just know that you are not necessarily buying just from DirectCPV.
All in all, I think they are a good network and easy to use, but the little issues do bug me. The lack of explanation also bugs me, but ultimately it’s profitable for me, so I have no complaints.
Hopefully this helps you out in your quest for a PPV network that’s right for you.
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Brilliant!
The current buzz around the Internet is about the new addition to apple’s privacy policy and how evil it is.
Essentially, Apple is forcing a new updated privacy policy agreement on users when they are downloading apps from the App store. The agreement states that, “…Apple and unspecified ‘partners and licensees’ may collect and store user location data. The data will be anonymous, but given the infancy of privacy related precedance to new media technologies Apple is treading on thin ice.
It seems fairly obvious what they are going to do and that it’s all for iAd, Apple’s new ad side of the business. I love the idea only because I thought of this a few years back in relation to local advertising and the Internet…or at least an iteration of it 
Geo-targeting via IP allows local advertisers to target specific people within a certain proximity to their physical store. So, the local sandwhich store down the road can tempt you with their new tuna melt while you search for “Sub sandwhich” on a search engine. This still requires the searcher to actually get up off their butts and drive down to the advertisers store.
What if you could deliver the offer to the user when they were standing right outside your store OR at least within close walking proximity? All of a sudden I am advertising to a person that can probably see my sandwhich store from where they are standing. That’s extremely powerful advertising and ads location to the mix of demographics used for targeting advertising.
What Apple needs to do now is build a self-service system into iAds similiar to Google Adwords. If all of a sudden a massive amount of people can access people real-time and present them offers the revenue opportunity could be enormous. The self-service system also has low overhead and doesn’t have a barrier to entry.
I can see this working great in shopping malls, because I know when I go shopping with my family I check my phone a few times. How many times have you seen the “dad’s” sitting on the bench outside of the stores playing with their phones?
I realize the knee jerk reaction to all of this is privacy and the last thing I really want to happen is to have Apple know EVERY step I take, but with great power comes great responsibility. If implemented correctly, this could be a very powerful advertising system and the future of local advertising as we know it.
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PPV advertising is the best vehicle for direct response marketing and pretty horrible for brand marketing. Having been in the industry for 7 years now I have seen all sorts of different types of advertisers test our system. The ones that have the most success are the direct response advertisers.
Wikipedia defines “direct response marketing” as having these 4 characteristics:
- An offer
- Sufficient information for the consumer to make a decision whether to act
- An explicit “call to action”
- Means of response (typically multiple options such as a toll free number, web page, and email)
This advertising model works out perfectly with PPV advertising because you are showing a pop-up window. The thing to understand is that the user is not as interested as someone in any other advertising model like PPC or even CPM banners. These pop-up windows are shown strictly on the keywords you choose to associate with your ad, so you can assume that the user is “in the general mood” for what you are advertising. Since the user is not necessarily in the “buy it now” mode you need to make your message as compelling as possible and as quickly as possible.
Your landing page, or at least what’s above the fold of the browser window, needs to be able to attract the user to want to learn more. This is something that many advertisers don’t think about and why a lot of them fail. View your landing page, or better yet, have your friend view your landing page and ask them what comes to their mind first. Can they identify the above 4 characteristics of direct response marketing? If not, go back to the drawing board.
The first thing you should do when crafting up your landing page is to ask your account manager at the PPV network what the exact dimensions are of the window that opens up to their users. This gives you the exact palette to create your masterpiece on. It doesn’t make sense to have your “call to action” button not even show when the ad is shown right?
Remember that PPV is different from PPC and that your potential customer isn’t as qualified, so your landing page needs to be optimized for that. Direct response marketing can be very successful in PPV networks with the right landing page.
I worked at a company that invented what is currently called PPV (pay per view) advertising. We created what was called CPV advertising, or Cost Per Visitor. It’s the same thing, just another way to say it. We basically referred to it from the selling side and not the advertiser’s traffic buying side.
Pay per view advertising, as I have seen it, is referenced to adware networks that are selling you an impression from a pop to one of their users. Depending on the network you are buying from this can range from downloadable games to search toolbars. The user is then delivered directly to the website of your choosing, normally based on keywords or url’s.
The main premise behind PPV advertising is that you are delivering an advertisement to a user when they are in the mood for the keywords you have purchased. For example, if you own a website that sells replica Nike shoes and you target a keyword like “Fake Nike Shoes”, then the user searching for that and then seeing your website is more than likely going to convert into a sale.
Choosing keywords is crucial to the success of your campaign with PPV 
advertising. A common issue with going from PPC to PPV is the thinking that you can just transition all of your keywords from your PPC campaign to your PPV campaign. This couldn’t be farther from the truth! With PPC you have bigger keyword lists and are looking for long-tail keywords that convert, because you are looking for low cpc’s to capitalize on. With PPV you want to start off with a small list of well targeted keywords and then expand from there into a bigger list.
I am the type of person that looks to make money in everything they do and usually have ideas that are not always so straight forward. The overused term would be “out of the box” thinking. Read the rest of My Own LLC »
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