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So over the past week I’ve been testing out this one campaign on PPV, along with many others. This one proved to be very difficult, however, as it showed some promise and then just did nothing the next few days. I thought it would be a good example to talk about here.

Now, I won’t be going in to specifics about anything here because that wouldn’t help out anyone. 50 noobs would just rip it off and destroy anyones profitability in a few hours. Instead, I will talk about the steps I used to take the campaign from being down -80% ROI over a week, and showing promise to bump that to profitable within 24 hours.

Picking your offer is pretty much the first thing you need to do. Sometimes you should really pick a niche and rotate through offers in that niche to find the best converter. In this instance, I was lazy and just found an offer in an obscure niche. It just looked like something that wouldn’t have a lot of competition. With PPV becoming more and more flooded, you’ve kinda gotta look for these and move away from the mainstream.

After getting my offer set up in Prosper, I headed over to AffPortal to scrape some targets. I usually always start off by using URL targets first, as they seem a bit easier to find real converters and give a bit more traffic than keywords. Keyword targeting to demographics is also difficult. I just thought up a few keywords relevant to what I thought  people interested in the offer would want. Again, the offer I was using was pretty far from mainstream browsing, so I didn’t expect to get many visitors on long URLs or unknown domains. I just kept it as relevant to the offer as I could and scraped about 300 URLs with AffPortal.

I grabbed my to be targets and slid them in to Excel. Always do this step – browse  and scan your targets. If there is an unfamiliar URL, put it in your browser and see what it is about. Get rid of irrelevant targets or targets not matching the demographics you are looking for. Double check this, and make sure you also get rid of any websites like Yahoo, Google or sites that get a lot of traffic but no relevance to what you need. I can’t tell you how many times I missed that and spent $100 in 15 minutes on targets that gave me jack shit for conversions.

Alright, so I posted this all in TrafficVance and just direct linked to this lead gen offer page that was paying out about $10 on a 1 page submit with about 10 forms to fill. Most of the bids were pretty low with the highest being around 10 cents and the rest between 1 – 4 cents per view. I just bid in to first place for all new campaigns so I can quickly get data about the offers I’m running.

After a couple hours after being approved I had spend 5 – 6 bucks and saw 1 conversion. Looked like it would have some potential. I spent about 30 bucks a day and saw two conversions over 3 days. Wow… that’s not too good. I had to go back and look at what I was doing.

I figured my first downfall was that I needed a landing page because the offer page was too big for the pop. (TrafficVance pops up at about 750 x 550 so forms on the right side might not be visible without scrolling). I also noticed that I was sending more clicks than I was getting on the affiliate network which also means that it is getting loaded way too slow for the networks impression pixel to be loaded. This could mean that my server or the offers server might be bad. I had Wiredtree check my server and see if they could optimize anything to speed it up, but with a $500 server, that shouldn’t be much of a problem.

So the best way to solve these problems was just to use a stupid simple landing page. I quickly just photoshopped a 750 by 550 banner with Arial text giving away the basic theme of the leadgen, a silly picture somewhat related to the offer, and some classic blue underlined link text in the bottom. It took me a total of 2 minutes to throw together. I compressed it as much as I could, got it down to about 50kb which is reasonable for a pop-up and loaded it up wrapped in an HTML page making the whole image click able.

These types of LPs generally do well with PPV because they’re obnoxious and they stick out. We’re doing interuption marketing here, people. Gotta look unique to get them clicks.

However, after I threw this LP up, I wasn’t getting a single click through. 1000 impressions and not a single click. I made sure my pop-up was coming up fast and loading correctly, which it was. People just weren’t responding to the landing page, which I thought was very odd. I think it may have been because the niche was a professional, big money niche (meaning, gotta spend a lot of money to get whats at the end of the tunnel in this niche). Funny enough, when I got a more professional thought out design by my designer, I was right enough, and clicks started coming in.

The conversion rate still sucked. I offer was probably a bust. They gave me one conversion off the bat and teased me along with 1 or two here and then no more after $100 spent. It was time to change the offer.

I found another offer in the same niche, however, the payout was less than half. There was more incentive to fill out the forms on this page, so I said what the hell and tried it. I got my designer to do two professional style landing pages for the offer again, and rotated through them. They both got okay click through rates, but they still weren’t what I was looking for. The offer broke even on my low CTR, so I knew I was on the right track.

I experimented with different styling to help the landing page. Adding the color red as a border and to some of the text helped me bring up my CTR to a healthy percentage where I was happy and profitable. The new offer converts much better than the other, and I should make all of the money I lost testing the previous offer back within the next 24 hours.

Once I get to a level like this, I really try not to mess with landing pages and nit picking over what ad copies will give me a 1% higher CTR. I think my time is better spent organizing ideas for new campaigns and putting them to work, especially with PPV. PPV can be very violent, where you are making $1000 on one campaign the first day, and then it just dies the next. The same can also be said for the offer. You need a lot of eggs with PPV.

So to go deeper with this, I’ll expand my keywords and URLs and just filter them when I get enough data to find out whether they are profitable targets or not. I try not to add more than 100 per day. More than that and you might end up losing your head trying to manage it.