Aug
3
DirectCPV PPV CPV Network Review
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.
