Jun
15
Direct response marketing and PPV advertising
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.
