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:

1. Overall account spending
2. 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.

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.

Wikipedia defines “direct response marketing” as having these 4 characteristics:

1. An offer
2. Sufficient information for the consumer to make a decision whether to act
3. An explicit “call to action”
4. 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.

As I researched more it turns out that stumbleupon is selling on a CPV pricing model and charging a minimum 5 cent CPV…that’s $50 CPM!!!  Needless to say, with that kind of pricing I was expecting a great product, boy was I mistaken.

The way it works is that people with the stumblupon toolbar/plugin surf around the Internet and thumbs up or thumbs down any given website they are on.  This essentially creates a profile for stumbleupon to target against.  Once users have “stumbledupon” enough sites it seems like they bucket the users into given interests and in turn sell those as demographics to target for advertisers.  When the user with the stumbleupon toolbar/plugin click the “stumble!” button they are taken to a random advertisers site based on their personal interest.

I decided to give it a try just to see what $50CPM could yield my blog…I would have been better off burning the $20.  $20 is a small test, but I wanted to see what the initial results would yield.  400 targeted impressions should give me decent insight into the quality of the traffic.

The results were 8 people out of 400 impressions “liking” my website and an average duration on site of 14 seconds.  Not good by any means and leads me to believe that people aren’t really that interested when they stumble.  I was targeted to the “SEO” section, so it was targeted, but I guess I was hoping for more considering the $50CPM.

A few specific things I don’t like which I think can be attributed to this being a new business for them are:

1. No hourly caps – I was able to set a cap, but only on a daily basis, so I did $5 a day probably in the first few minutes of the day.  Broken down hourly would allow a better flow of traffic with the natural patterns of internet traffic throughout the day.
2. Confusing interface – While the layout is visually nice, the actual functionality leaves much to be desired.  I found myself clicking all around to find something as simple as campaign details…I am still clicking.
3. Unclear definitions – Now this could be due to not being a hardcore stumbleupon user, but I have no clue what the score means.  I somehow have a 89% score, but there is no defintion as to what that even means.  When you click on the 89% it takes you to the stumblupon homepage for your domain.  Even when I got there I couldn’t figure out where the 89% was derived from.
4. Different budgets – There is a campaign budget and an account budget.  While I think the ability to control spend is always good, this should be handled only on the campaign level.  An advertiser should be smart enough to manage their spends on a campaign level, so this was just a bit confusing.

Conclusion:  All in all, I think stumbleupon has a good start to something that could do well, but I think the price point of $50CPM is a bit high given the unpolished interface and definitions.  At this point I would still stick to other CPV networks for promtion for the mere fact that they are cheaper, have better interfaces, and are more established.

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 ways are:  Pixels (from the PPV network) and Subid tracking.

Pixel Tracking and/or Conversion Tracking

Each PPV company has a different name for this, but what you want to look for is a snippet of code that you place on the confirmation page of the site you are driving traffic to.  This code snippet interacts directly with the software that the different PPV networks utilize and tracks back to their database the exact keyword(s) that led to the conversions.  It is crucial that you place this on the correct page or you will get false conversions and that will throw off your entire profitability calculation.

Once you have the pixel placed, you will then be able to pull reports from the PPV network login and see exactly which keywords are leading to conversions and more importantly which ones arent.  The keywords that aren’t providing any conversions are the ones that you need to get out of your campaign as soon as they have had a good amount of test traffic (this amount varies from advertiser to advertiser).

Subid Tracking

Subid tracking is simply when you associate one URL with a unique parameter value to a keyword.  In traditional internet marketing settings this would commonly be used to track different creatives on a website.  In the case of PPV, you will be using it to track the individual performance of keywords.  This is often seen when you are working with Affiliate networks where you can launch X amount of subids within their system and they will track back the conversion to those subids.

The links may looks something like this:

http://www.example.com/?subid=kw123

http://www.example.com/?subid=kw124

http://www.example.com/?subid=kw125

etc…

You will need to load up individual ads within the PPV network that you are working on which can be very cumbersome, but most have a bulk upload option.  If it is not clearly stated on their website it’s something that you can ask for.

What to do with the data?

Once you have the conversions by keyword by one of the above methods, you can figure out what your CPA (cost per acquisition) is, this will help you figure out just how much it is costs you to get a sale.  The CPA will vary from keyword to keyword and will allow you to figure out which keywords to bid up on.

To figure out your CPA, take the total amount you spent on a keyword and divide that by the amount of sales through the keyword.

You spent $12.35 on the keyword ‘mortgage*rate’ to get 4 conversions.  Your CPA would be $3.08.
You are spending $3.08 to get a lead.  The importance of knowing this allows you to calculate your profitability on the keyword.

Let’s say now that the lead is worth $12 to you, which means you know have a profit of $8.92.  You have room to increase your bids on the keyword ‘mortgage*rate’ and know the upper limit of what you can bid until you start losing money.

PPV Bidding Wars!

As I mentioned earlier, PPV networks are based on CPV bid prices.  You are essentially bidding against other advertisers for traffic on a given keyword.  Like any other free market economy things can get pretty competitive and vicious.  You will often find yourself getting caught up in bidding wars with other advertisers for the lions share of traffic.  If you take the above profitability equation you will have more restraint to this emotional war by knowing exactly how much the keyword is actually worth to you.

Several of the PPV networks have a built in proxy bidding option which will let your bids automatically adjust to the current competition in the network.  You can very easily set all of the highest bid prices you are willing to spend on a keyword and not need to watch your campaigns minute by minute.  Doing this will save you tons of time and money in the long run.

Tracking is just one small part of PPV Internet Marketing, but it’s probably one of the most crucuial parts in my opinion.  Setup your tracking correctly and not only will you be making a ton of money, you’ll be making a ton of money efficiently.

Next week, I’ll touch on the differnt PPV networks out there and the plusses and minusses of each to help you decide which one gets your hard earned money.

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 software out there that PPV networks utilize are scanning the URL.  The software then brings back a list of potential keywords and the shortest term often gets triggered.  So while it’s great to have a giant list of every variation of a keyword it often times doesn’t do anything for you in regards to actual targeting.  These giant lists also cause a management headache for you as the advertiser because the self-service websites that these networks have is not optimized to handle that many keywords.  If the website is not optimized to handle this amount then you gotta figure that they don’t want you using that many keywords.

When you are starting a new campaign, they key is to keep the list small, anywhere between 30-50 keywords is perfect.  These will be the most targeted keywords you can think of that are relative to the website you are trafficking.  I call these Tier 1 keywords.  Think of it like a dartboard where the bulls eye is your group of Tier 1 keywords.  As you start seeing success with those keywords you start expanding your list broader and broader until you have a really good PPV keyword list.

Example PPV Keyword list for a website that sells computers:

Tier 1
tigerdirect.com/sectors/computers
newegg.com/Store/Computer
buy desktop computer
buy network card
…

Tier 2
laptop computer
computer part
hard drive
…

Tier 3
computer
laptop
usb
…

Tier 4
back to school
word processing
new office
…

As you can see, Tier 1 is where you will make a majority of your sales as they are the most targeted, but at the same time there will not be a lot of traffic.  Focus on building out that Tier first and then expand out your list.  With the lower Tier’s you can see how the keywords get broader and broader, ultimately ending in Tier 4 where the words are now just instances where a computer is used.

PPV keyword lists are only one piece of the PPV puzzle and the next, probably most crucial part, is tracking.  I’ll be covering that in the next post.  Once you have the list you’ll need to be able to figure out exactly what is working and the only way to do this is keyword level tracking.  All PPV networks are based on a bidding system in which individual advertisers are bidding on the price they are willing to pay for a keyword.  If you don’t know how well a specific keyword is doing for you, than you may be paying too much for that word and actually losing money on a “good” keyword.

I’ll cover the importance of tracking PPV campaigns next…

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.

All of the PPV networks are based on a bidding system, so track what works for you and capitalize on those keywords.  Bidding wars on keywords can get really crazy, but if you know the exact profitability of a keyword for you, than you will know what makes sense.  Don’t outbid someone just to outbid someone, do it sensibly and you’ll start raking in the dough.

The different PPV networks will vary on their targeting abilities, so ask the network how their software works before spending your hard earned money.  This will definitely allow you to make the right decision on which network to spend your money with.  The differences can be slight, but the results will be noticeable.  The network that I worked for allows both keyword and url targeting and is based of the actual software being able to trigger off those specific terms.  Other networks will take your keywords or urls and do category targeting.  For example, if your keyword is specifically “match.com”, they may just throw you into the “dating” category.  While this might seem ok, the category targeting is far inferior.  Now, there is one exception to the rule…if you are paying a lower CPV for the category traffic than cool, but make sure you have a clear answer from the PPV network on exactly how they work.

That’s all for now, I’ll tackle more PPV stuff in an upcoming post…

I have finally taken the opportunity to start up my own LLC with a focus on Internet marketing. I have been in the space now for 7 years with a focus on PPV/CPV advertising. I know everything there is about this space and can hopefully take that knowledge and share it with all of you on this blog.

I am extremely excited to have my own company and look forward to what is sure to be a learning experience. I’ll be posting more here in the next few days, but for now wanted to at least get the generic “Hello World” post removed.