Justin Dupre » Pay Per View

PPV Case Study Teaser: Lords of Ultima

Justin Dupre — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:05:59 +0000

Here’s a general case study for you guys. It wasn’t a huge smash hit, making me lower double digits, so I didn’t bother to really optimize it. I pretty much let it run on its own for a the short life span of the campaign as a few days after launch the campaign was pulled from the network.

Step 1: Offer Selection

I look for offers I think would perform decently without a landing page. It just gives me more confidence that once I have a landing page, my EPC will only go up with the extra presell. These types of offers aren’t as common as they used to be (think short form lead gens that convert on the first page). I took a look at EWA and found Lord of Ultima to fit those specs, but with a very, very low payout. Only $0.95 a conversion. I always shied away from games, but thought what the hell, because I knew it would only take 1 hour to build it, and 15 more minutes to optimize it once I had my data.

Step 2: Scraping Targets

I decided to just go for niche targeting here. I could have done demographic targeting, but it would take more optimization, and with $0.95 payouts, you don’t have much room for testing some of those higher traffic targets out, especially if you are on a budget or don’t want to bother with managing it (call me lazy, but I think I’d call it being efficient. I knew this campaign wouldn’t make me more than $50 a day at the get-go).

… and that’s all you blog readers get! To read the rest of the case study, join the private forums. I reveal my targeting scheme and what targets did the best. You can mimic the campaign with other similar offers using the same targets! When you join, you’ll also get access to a large downloads section (over 50 landing pages and ad creatives already up for grabs to members), special offers and discounts, and one-on-one help from me.

Affiliate Marketing Offers That Don’t Convert on PPV

Justin Dupre — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 21:12:35 +0000

Most any offer is marketable through PPV. There is a certain line, though, where an offer becomes more difficult than the rest. I just wanted to cover some of those lines and share with you guys how you can spot an easier affiliate offer from the rest.

Amount of Info on the 1st Page

How much info is there on the first page? Does it presell the offer well? Now assuming you are direct linking, sending people straight to a 10 form page with very little explanation to what service they are signing up for wouldn’t really work. When I’m looking to direct link (which honestly, I don’t do much of anymore), I don’t want more than a few forms to fill out on the first page. I prefer more if it is actually a multiple page submit, where the first page is just an information page with a big sign up here button.

Offer Page Size

Here is another important one for you direct linkers. The offer might be a super easy converter. Fill out 1 – 2 forms and get your commission, right? Sure, if it fits on the pop up. Most PPV networks pop at 750 x 550 pixels, but many offers are much wider than that. If the conversion button or forms are off the side or below that 750 x 550 pixel pop-up, that easy commission just got a little harder as the user has to actively scroll to see it. This is another reason why landing pages seem to be the way to go now.

Free vs. CC Submit

There is still a lot of money to be made in CPS/Rebill products with PPV. It isn’t impossible to sell, but it is much harder, and you will have to use a landing page. In my private forums, you can find one such example I used for rebill offers (and no, it wasn’t a flog/fartical/fake testimonial). I have also made some CPS offers work on PPV, too, however, the payouts are lower and much harder to work with. You need to spend a lot of money testing landing pages and targets before you start seeing results. For the affiliate marketer on a budget, you may want to steer clear.

So do you see any type of offers or offer page styles that work better than the other? Talk about it in the comments, or join the forums for further conversation!

Managing a Bidding War With PPV: How to Win It

Justin Dupre — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 19:15:15 +0000

I hate, hate, hate it when people enter a bidding war with me. I’m very competitive and hate being on the losing team. When people try and do it on PPV, I’ll try my best to stay on top of the pack.

I’ll start out by saying that you probably don’t want to enter a bidding war with 5+ other people in it. It’s hard to manage, and expensive. If I know it is gonna be a ton of people in position – and you can tell if its a lot if you set your bid to 1 cent – I’ll usually stay away if my EPC is already pretty close to the total bid. Our goal with this bidding war is to frustrate the hell out of our opponent and make him simply drop all traffic by out bidding him, make him lose money, and get him desperate.

1. Keep auto-refreshing your bids page. We want to make sure you get as much traffic as possible. Keep auto-refreshing the page every 5 minutes or so and check to make sure you are still number 1. Your opponent might not be as dedicated as you, step out to eat lunch, or go to sleep. Capitalize on moments like this and steal the traffic back!

2. Know your EPC. We don’t want to bid too far over our EPC, but we may need to to bump our opponent out of his comfort zone. Chances are, you might be running the same offer, so your EPCs may be similar. You’ll want to know you are maximizing your earnings through optimized landing pages. As an added buffer, I collect emails, which in some niches gives me a lot more money down the line, making direct EPC completely negligible if I know what I’m doing with the niche.

3. Make him outbid you by a lot over his EPC. Yesterday I was stuck in a bidding war. I was shocked when I turned back to the screen and saw the guy trying to knock me out of the front spot by bidding over $5.00. The nutter left his bid there for about 15 – 20 minutes which means he spent about $100 in that time period on a campaign that only spends about $20 – 30 a day on that target. Way to ruin your ROI. He dropped his bid, and for the rest of the day I was bid in place 1. He either ran out of money or hit his daily campaign budget, like a fool. Yeah, if you’re reading this… you’re an idiot.

4. Download the adware and start spying. Get it on your PC or virtual private server to start spying on ads. I know people that keep it on their computers just so they can see what everyone else is doing while they’re working or browsing the Internet. Anyways, hit up the target that the war is on, grab their LP URL, their affiliate URL, and their tracking URL, and add them to your targets. Make sure they get absolutely no traffic/coversions. Yeah, its mean, but F*%# You… these are my targets.

5. Grab the internal page URLs of the targets you are going after, and bump your bid 0.01 above what they’re bidding on for the root domain. Now, I’m not sure if this is what is up, but my thinking is that you have to beat his bid, and he probably isn’t targeting the internal pages, but just the root. So his root domain bid will stay the same, but he won’t see you are bidding more on internal pages. He gets the traffic for the root, but chances are if visitors are coming from search engines and such, they probably aren’t going straight to the root. Again, this is just speculation and I haven’t played with the idea enough to see if it is true or not, but I think this could work.

Got any of your own ideas on how to beat your bidding wars? Share them here or talk about it in the forums!

PPV Tip of the Day: Kill the Deadbeats

Justin Dupre — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:46:04 +0000

We all know you cut out the URLs and keyword targets that have done significant amounts of traffic, yet provide a negative ROI. You’d be one broke hustler if you didn’t. I’d also be slightly inclined to call you stupid.

However, what about the stuff that just picks up a few views per day. You’ve had the campaign running successfully over 1 month, but you’ve got 1000 or so targets that just sit there, trickling in traffic that have converted maybe once or twice, or not at all, in 4 weeks. Do you wait till you spend 1 – 2 times the payout before pausing them to see if just maybe they are profitable?

Well, you could, but how much fun would that be when you find out 90% of your targets will never be profitable? If I have 1000 different targets on a 4 dollar dating niche offer, I’d have to spend $4000 – 8000 just to test all those targets, and some targets may take a year to even get that amount of traffic. Sure, I might find 10 – 20 more targets that give 30 – 50 more conversions per month, but that is only 6 extra bucks a day.

I say, if they don’t have conversions after 7 days and haven’t reached your spend limit, just kill them. I do it to my campaigns, and I’ll notice a small increase in ROI just because I don’t have these 1000s of small insignificant targets creating 10 cents of pops each (That would add up to a minimum of $100 extra ad spend going to testing that just wouldn’t give you enough data unless you waited a month or so to collect it all). It just isn’t worth the mini-management you’ll have to do.

Case Study: Bumping Up Landing Page Conversions Rates on PPV – Part 3

Justin Dupre — Mon, 31 May 2010 08:51:21 +0000

Well, this sure has been an interesting week for this campaign.

I wanted to find out if my landing page mocking my target page would convert better than a general landing page design. What I found out wasn’t quite what i expected.

In some cases, it helped, in some cases, it didn’t. 1 target went from negative ROI to 100% positive. Another 2 stayed positive, but ROI dropped about 20%, and 1 just bombed compared to the general landing page. Quite odd if you ask me.

I have some theories behind this:

To mimic the targets LP, more graphics had to be added to the landing page. This could cause a significant slow down in page loading time which is important for PPV.
It could have something to do with demographics, although it is something I’d have to study more in depth. It seemed the male demographics converted better on the mocked LP, while females converted higher on the general LP.
Might have just overdone the LPs. I made the LPs look exactly like their target counterparts – logo, buttons, link color, etc. My best converting LP was designed around the target page, but left out a lot of things like the logo and didn’t quite have an identical layout. It was an inspired design, but not copied. Perhaps the viewers didn’t think it was a legit offer from the target site.

So was this case study a total waste of time? Absolutely not. I gathered a ton of data. I experimented a lot and gout outside my comfort zone. Using the collected data, I can apply it to future campaigns, and constantly keep analyzing it to see why things went right and why some things turned sour. I know that testing landing page designs is a lot more important than I previously realized. While I always split test for the best results, I now know that perhaps I wasn’t thinking it through far enough.

So now I’m going back on these campaigns to rebuild landing pages and effectively split test them with 2-3 different landing pages, some general, some slighly based off the target, and all very light in size. This is what I have concluded will convert the best for me, although I can’t keep assuming this. It will be effectively split test on all my campaigns from here on out. PPV is a weird beast to tame, and is hardly ever consistent like this.

Case Study: Bumping Up Landing Page Conversions Rates on PPV – Part 2

Justin Dupre — Wed, 26 May 2010 03:36:53 +0000

In Part 1, I talked about how one of my targets showed a lot of promise that it could perform with positive ROI, however, it just wasn’t at that level, yet. I was loosing about $30 for every $100 I spent on this one target. I took several steps to get around this.

Completely revamped the landing page. It is now designed to look like a pop-up from the target website.
Changed some ad copy so it would be more relevant to the users.
I added in some sound with an auto playing video. Originally, I intended to use a video, but instead, I just found some ear-catching sound clip on Youtube, resized the video on the landing page so you could only see the play/pause button, and put it in an unimportant spot on the landing page.

I moved the URL, as well as internal URLs and the URL in keyword form (Website.com to just website), to a new creative in TrafficVance under the same campaign for easy testing. After running for 24 hours I’m not shocked with the results.

I went from negative -30 percent ROI, and bumped it to a massive 225% ROI. The total time it took for me to make all these changes? About 2 – 3 hours for the landing pages and setup, 10 minutes to reconfigure the campaign in TrafficVance, then half a day until it was approved.

It’s not spending $1000 a day to the point where I’d be making mad money on this target, because that kind of money just isn’t there with this target, but it is one small step in building an empire with PPV campaigns. In order to prove that this isn’t just a one time luck kind of deal, I will also be trying this same technique with a few other targets that are currently making me about 100% ROI. If it stands to hold the same sort of conversion rates, I should see a real boost in my profit. That will be coming up in part 3.

Case Study: Bumping Up LP Conversions Rates on PPV – Part 1

Justin Dupre — Mon, 24 May 2010 05:27:21 +0000

I’ve got one troublesome target on a PPV campaign I’m running. It’s got a ton of traffic, but no matter what I do to my general landing page, I can’t get the ROI above -30% on it. I’ve already tried direct linking, however, this incurred a serious loss of any revenue and held a very poor conversion rate. I know I gotta boost the LP CTR and that I can get this profitable, because it isn’t actually losing too much percentage-wise. This is what I plan to do to get it profitable.

Rehaul the landing page

I’ll be starting out with a whole new landing page design. How do I want it to look? Well, just like that target URL. This is a very frequently used tactic, however, I don’t use it much as I’ve been focusing my efforts more on general campaign building, campaigns with more long tail targets with low traffic and low revenue, but with many campaigns can add up quick. I want to see if I can take a high traffic target and flip it to a high profit target through this new landing page.

Copy rehaul

Another thing I’ll be playing around with is the copy. “Special offer for (TARGET) users:”, “Exclusive to (TARGET LOGO) shoppers here!”, etc. I’ve used the auto-referrer import scripts before, and they’ve done wonders for my LP CTR. I shouldn’t be surprised when I see this used.

Auto-play Video

I love autoplaying videos on my landing pages, but I haven’t used it for this offer yet. I’ll be throwing one in to see if it can help improve my CTR and conversion rates.

I’ll be showing you the results in a couple days. By the way, if you are looking for more PPV Case Studies, the private forums with PPVPlaybook comes with a ton of them. The ebook and most of the information on the forums there won’t be helpful for someone already making high $XXX to $XXXX a day, but for someone completely new to it (a noob), you might find some value out of it. The owner, David, is a really smart guy, as well, and I really learned a lot from him when we did our PPV Mastermind session in Las Vegas at ASW.

Case Study: Breaking Down a PPV Campaign

Justin Dupre — Wed, 19 May 2010 17:56:45 +0000

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.

Complete List of PPV/CPV Traffic Networks, Tools and Affiliate Networks

Justin Dupre — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:54:31 +0000

I just wanted to compile a list of all known PPV networks so I could have them in one place, for myself and all my readers. The list isn’t 100% complete, as I don’t know every single network out there, so if you could help me out by commenting the post with any I missed, that’d be great! I’ll add them to the list as soon as I see your comment. I also added a list of PPV tools to help you create campaigns, as well as a list of affiliate networks that love PPV traffic. Anywho, to the list!

PPV/CPV Networks

PPV Tools:

AffPortal (Scrapers, Keyword tools, and more!)
PPVPlaybook (Good beginners ebook + private forums for PPV knowledge)
Affexpert (Free during beta testing)
Keyword Rockstar (Not built for PPV, but I use it to dig large Keyword and URL lists)
Aweber (Used to build mailing lists)
Justin Dupre Marketplace (I just had to. PPV landing pages, creatives, and custom services)

Affiliate Networks

Once again if you know of anything I should have listed, but missed, inform me in the comments below!

A Simple Way to Split Test PPV Landing Pages Without a Rotator

Justin Dupre — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:59:02 +0000

Prosper202 is a funky piece of scripting. Trying to split test landing pages through it can be an arduous process. Sometimes the keywords/urls get passed through correctly, sometimes they don’t. I had a coder hack P202 to pieces and make a landing page rotator that works 99% of the time with a few bells and whistles, but for those without access to something like this, you’re left to the stock P202. Without confusing yourself with more PHP redirects or whatever you want to use, I thought up of a simple way to split test your landing pages or offers.

It’s stupid simple, and you guys that have been doing any sort of affiliate marketing for any amount of time will ask me why I decided to post something so “stupid” on my blog. Well, because you probably aren’t the majority of my readers. If you’re looking for something a little more complex than what I have listed here, hire a programmer to code you up something custom to what you specifically need or Google landing page rotator.

Anyways, you set up your landing pages as you normally would in Prosper202. Grab in the tracking links and tracking codes as required.

Get all your URLs and keywords you’ll be targeting together. (Use Affportal.. yeah I love to whore them out, but its an awesome tool set for any beginner and I still use it daily. These tools turn my buck a day that it costs into thousands of dollars. They also have a PHP and ASP landing page rotator available for download to all members, making this post almost irrelevant at this point!)

Make your main-campaign and grab your link for one of the landing pages. Put that landing page into its own sub-campaign (I’m pretty sure all PPV networks use this layout – TV, MT, LeadImpact, etc). Put in all your URLs and keywords and bid the required minimum. Keep all your bids at the minimum.

For any other landing pages, just grab the link for those pages and put them in the sub-campaign under the main campaign. Put in the same URLs at the minimum bid.

Doing this, you are competing against yourself, and it should split the traffic evenly across the landing pages. If you want to go further, you can take the conversion pixels/post backs from the networks or your P202 install, but I just grab sub-ids for a more accurate report. With that data, you’ll be able to see which landing page performs better. What you might find out is one landing page is profitable for one target while another is profitable on a different target.

Once you know what landing page you’ll run, increase your bids so you start getting more impressions from converting targets. Delve deep into profit calculations. You can be the top bidder and make 10% ROI conversion, or you can bid a few levels down, get 1/4th of the traffic, but make 100% ROI.

And that’s how I would split test without editing your P202 install or including any extra external scripts. Prosper202 has just been updated, but I haven’t upgraded yet as I’ve yet to hear how it performs, if Bloosky is sniffing out any data from it, and I’d have to convert all of my edits over to it which is a pain in the ass, takes time and it’s expensive.