Archive for the ‘ppv marketing’ Category

Slice Your Way To PPV Profit… Ninja Style

I’m going to start by apologizing for false affbuzztizing. There are no ninjas in this post. The closest to a ninja you’re going to get is the knowledge that I’m wearing nothing but an all black towel as I write this. Yeah, I’m pretty much wet and soapy.

I’ve been meaning to post about some PPV techniques for a while now, because there’s only so much rhetorical bullshit I can rehash as “lifestyle advice” before people start to call me out on a mysterious lack of…actual content.

There are two problems with PPV.

1. Everybody is doing it.
2. You’re probably not very good at it.

PPV promotion – or any kind of advertising where you’re springing pop-ups on the user – is a method of interruption marketing that has to be approached differently to your normal social campaigns. And god forbid, get back to the drawing board if you’re trying to port your Search campaigns directly to PPV.

I’ve already posted about laser targeting PPV campaigns, and shocking users in to clicking your ads. I’ve had people emailing me quoting mixed results. Some have found a lot of success using the techniques, while others…not so much. *cough* NATURAL SELECTION *cough*

Instead of replying to a thousand different scenarios with a thousand possible reasons for why they didn’t work, I thought I’d explain the thought process that goes in to my own campaigns. And of course, many of these fail too.

The way I see it, profiting from PPV is all about brainstorming and developing enough ideas to attack a campaign from different angles. So many concepts out there are beaten and battered in to a state that you’d have to be Vince Offer on crack to make the product sound original. I don’t like joining the swarming masses, and I prefer to develop campaigns that leverage a very specific appeal to a relevant audience.

That’s great, right? Nobody cares, you just want practical examples.

Let’s say you’re going to promote a dating site, what are the obvious choices for targeting your ads? What are some keywords you might use?

Singles in [...]
Online dating in [...]
Get a girlfriend
Chat to girls online
Meet new people
Dating advice

You’re not going to win any gold medals for envelope-pushing creativity with this kind of targeting. That’s not to say it won’t work, but you’re battling with the masses.

Many marketers fail to understand why their campaigns are failing when they’re reaching such a targeted group of users.

“If Jo Bloggs is searching for a girlfriend, why won’t he use my link? Wah wah wahhh. It’s right there! Wah wah wahhh”

These users are clearly interested in online dating so why aren’t they snapping up your bait and whacking in their credit card details? A lot of the time it’s because they’re too well trained in the market you’re trying to promote. Just because you’re pumping a pop-up with “COME FLIRT NOW” in his face, doesn’t mean he hasn’t seen the message a thousand times before and already grown sick of it.

It’s not banner blindness, but you’re targeting a type of user who clearly knows what he’s looking for. And these users are sometimes the most likely to hammer the little x on your pop-ups. Why? Because they’re already reading similar ads in the Google search listings and don’t need your crap popping up!

It’s like old school porn surfing (oh god Finch). You reach a site with that really niche midget porn you’ve been looking for. Then some motherfucker springs a pop-up over your hard work which is less targeted and frankly a pain in the arse after the seven sites you clicked through to find what you were looking for. I don’t watch midget porn.

Pro tip: If you’re going to target obvious keywords, make damn sure that your pop-up is more relevant than the actual page that the user is loading!

With my own campaigns, I like to come up with targeting strategies where the user shits himself at how close to his current state of mind my advert is striking home. If dating is your niche, you should be looking to brainstorm a little deeper. Understand the reasons WHY these people might be suitable for an online dating site.

Don’t worry about the dude searching for “chat to girls online”. Worry about finding him before he reaches breaking point and realizes that this is what he wants to do. To manage this, you need to become receptive to human psychology and use your ears. Yes, use your ears.

Clues for targeting your campaigns are all around you. I find myself phasing out in the middle of conversations with friends when my brain is latching on to things that they’ve said. I will be damned if there’s a better way of brainstorming campaign ideas for a dating offer than by spending half an hour talking to single friends. You begin to understand their psychology and thinking.

My favourite line of questioning is to ask them why they THINK they’re single.

Invariably I get answers along the lines of…

• Target 1. “Because I don’t have the confidence to go and talk to girls”
• Target 2. “Because there aren’t many girls that like the same things as me”
• Target 3. “Because I’m still torn up over my ex”
• Target 4. “Because I’m too busy to be bothered with a relationship”
• Target 5. “Because I just haven’t found anyone at the moment”

This information is gold to me. My mind then turns to how I can translate these feelings in to PPV campaigns that don’t just target the right demographics, but hit them with stinging headlines that make them scream “YES” to the service I’m offering.

Let’s take target 3. For all we know, that guy who was searching for “chat to girls online” could have been the same guy who’s just suffered a horrible broken down marriage. We could target him with “chat to girls online”, yes, but it’s a LOT more powerful if we hit him before he’s reached Google. If we can reach out to him as an individual and be the solution to what bothers him most – we’ve got much more chance of nailing the conversion.

So where else could you target this guy?

How about on divorce websites? Marriage breakup Facebook groups? The thousands of articles on the web offering advice for dealing with a broken down relationship?

Not only can we catch the same target, but we can adapt a PPV campaign that is MUCH more effective than the standard dating LP you got from Justin Dupre’s Freebie Friday. Get creative with your headlines and imagery.

“You Think Your Ex Isn’t Searching Online? Get Back In The Dating Game Tonight”

This is what I would call slicing through the market and grabbing leads where you can resonate with them most. By segmenting markets and producing creatives that deal with genuine human emotions, you can be the answerer of those needs. It’s a lot easier than trying to grab your conversions from the huge pool of users searching generic dating terms.

I’ve got a couple more posts to come on PPV so check back soon if this is your thing.

Any questions, drop me a comment. I’m off to find some clothes.

Too Many Fish In The Sea With PPV

Once upon a time, PPV was the new craze for affiliate marketers. Less guidelines to stick to, less slaps to run from…but now unfortunately, a whole lot more competition to bid against. Over the last six months, I’ve highlighted two different approaches to profiting from PPV:

Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns
Shock Marketing Tactics For PPV Profits

Another tactic I’ve read about on other blogs and forums involves “brand bidding”.

Brand bidding? The art of matching a branded CPA offer to a branded web page and hoping against hope that the margins stack up in your favour. The problem, as I’m sure most of you will have realized by now, is that they rarely do.

When I first got in to PPV, I saw zip and email submits as my gateway to riches and infinite private ball massages. A life of luxury by pushing offers that pay out, what, $1.30? The problem with matching PPV to these type of offers is that you don’t have as much margin to play with as you think you do. Throw in an element of scrubbing and people quite frankly not giving enough of a shit to wait for your pop-up to load from it’s shared hosting – you’re almost back to square one.

Brand bidding can actually be quite effective, but let me give you an example that probably isn’t going to out anybody who’s making more than 47 cents a day.

Here is your stereotypical iPhone email submit:

For a PPV virgin, it’s easy to get carried away and assume that a free iPhone offer is going to attract the interest of just about anybody browsing a domain with apple.com in the query string. And maybe it will. But if you’re going to master the art of brand bidding, you ultimately need to filter the crap first.

Direct brand bidding will swamp you with a large amount of traffic. From my experience, the profitability of bidding on a full domain just isn’t going to be sustainable 95% of the time. And even if it is, you’re using such a primal form of marketing that the next retard is waiting in the wings to bid $0.01 higher.

To take this iPhone example, the possibilities are endless for brand bidding – particularly if you ignore the temptation to bid on the actual Apple brand. I’ve always advocated “laser targeting”, particularly if you’re working with a low payout. A good method of brand bidding, less likely to attract tramp traffic, would be to dig out some links over on the o2 website. That’s a phone network for you yanks.

Take a URL target like this: http://shop.o2.co.uk/promo/iphoneindex/Pay_Monthly/3G_S/White

It’s a step forward in the sense that contrary to targeting apple.com, we know a few things about the visitors to this page:

• They’re thinking of buying an iPhone.
• They’re already in “comparing mode”, weighing up the pros and cons of the various deals.
• o2 is a possible point of purchase that they trust.

So where does brand bidding come in to the equation? There’s no sign of o2 on our direct linked landing page.

The next step would to create a landing page that bridges the gap between the URL target and the shoddy email submit we’re about to hit them with. I would suggest a landing page with a header along the lines of “Can o2.co.uk Match Our Outrageous iPhone Giveaway?”

I would not want to be creating separate landing pages for every last phone network on the web so the “o2.co.uk” would have to be dynamically inserted.

The header is designed to portray relevance. It’s almost a “brand extension”, particularly if you design your landing page using the same colour scheme and font selection. It also exploits the fact that we know the user is already in comparing mode. You can use this to your advantage by listing some existing deals on your landing page, and then dumping your free iPhone at the top of the list in fancy flashing lights.

Of course, the problem with these type of campaigns is that you’ll never find the same volume that you would in spreading the net far and wide.

Another way to play with brand bidding is the classic bait and switch. A few months ago I had a very profitable campaign targeting just one single page on the Plenty Of Fish website. The concept was to deliver leads to a free dating website (Zoosk and Mate 1). What better way to target fans of free dating websites than by hitting them where they already congregate?

Of course, you could pitch a dirty great pop-up for Zoosk on the front page of POF. But you’re going to run in to several problems.

The sheer volume of users accessing the root domain “plentyoffish.com” every day will be too great. By targeting the top domain, your pop-up will show not only when somebody goes to sign in, but when they reply to a message, when they browse a profile, when they see who’s viewed them. You’re simply catching too many fish to ever be profitable.

The second problem was a lack of targeting. POF has a relatively balanced mix between males and females. How can I spring a pop-up that appeals to both genders? With a dating offer, it’s essential to break down your demographics. You also need an offer that accepts traffic from the 18+ crowd.

So instead I targeted just a single page – the “Who Viewed Me” section.

The concept was again pretty simple. I had a landing page and a header reading “Getting Viewed But Not Getting Messaged?”

I plugged the image of a depressed singleton, a screenshot of an empty inbox and then the complete opposite under the brand logo I wanted to promote – “…Why not try a dating site where our sexy members aren’t afraid to say hello?” You can probably piece the rest of the idea together in your head. I’m not going to spell it out. Needless to say, my version was a lot more provocative.

Much to my surprise, this simple PPV campaign – with just one target – produced a nice ROI in the first few weeks. I soon realized though that my pitch was getting lost somewhat. Most women on POF are already getting messaged at every waking hour, so it wasn’t as effective considering a large percentage of my page loads were falling on female eyes. You can probably guess what I done. I used the same concept to target niche websites where gender wasn’t a factor. Examples aside, this kind of laser targeting is my preferred method of making money with PPV.

Brand bidding has it’s merits and can be used to good effect with the right offer. You will undoubtedly get conversions. But the challenge is to get those conversions while weeding out as much other traffic as you can to make it profitable.

There’s a huge misconception that PPV traffic is the cheapest on the market. I think that’s pretty much bullshit. It may be the cheapest in terms of what you’re paying for a “visitor”, but that doesn’t always equal good value. A good CPM campaign can drive the cost of a click down to as little as a few cents. And when a user has clicked, you know you’ve grabbed their attention. Yet with PPV, you’re paying around $0.02 for the loading of a pop-up. Most people hate pop-ups. Some won’t even wait for them to load. You do the maths.

If you’re promoting zip and email submits, it’s quite likely that the best tactic is good old fashioned CPM bidding on the content network. That’s a post for another day though. There’s a bandwagon rolling past claiming that PPV is the future for affiliate marketers. If you’re going to jump on, don’t be turning your back on the other opportunities that surround you.

Laser Targeting Your PPV Campaigns

Christ, I almost forgot about this place. About two weeks ago, I had a fetching list of topics to post about. So what happened?

Amsterdam happened.

An extended break in Holland has helped to relax my senses. Unfortunately to the point where I can’t remember much of what I wanted to say. Whenever I tell people that I’ve been to Amsterdam, I always feel the need to make it perfectly clear that “No, I didn’t.”

And even if I did, I probably wouldn’t remember, okay? Perhaps my single most striking memory of The Dam was being perched in a toilet, space caked out of my face, wondering what would happen if you whipped a pigeon. I swear to God, it seemed philosophical at the time.

Anyway, I believe the last post was about shock marketing tactics and how you could stun somebody in to clicking a creative if you pressed the right buttons.

This post swings to the other end of the scale. I want to look at how you could go about laser targeting – a favourite term of mine – with a traffic source as anonymous and faceless as PPV. It’s incredibly easy, but to do so, you will invariably need to sacrifice the one thing that keeps a super affiliate’s bed wet at night…volume.

Since I decided to start rambling about PPV again, I’ve been bombarded by contextual marketing virgins who would like to get a piece of the pie but just don’t know where to start. So I will say that this road is generally much easier and much cheaper than the methods outlined in my last post.

The best way to take a vice like grip over your PPV targeting is to only actually target one site. In some cases, even one page.

While providing a visual shock like the car crash scenario is often good for general targeting, you may find more success by designing your PPV creatives to be a working extension of the site that you’re targeting. You can’t go ripping the brand name and providing false endorsements, but you can use the user’s web location to your advantage.

One option may be to target the sport section of a national newspaper to crowbar in a PPV campaign along the lines of…

“Hey [Newspaper Title] Readers,

…And don’t forget to buy tomorrow’s edition of [...]“

Yes, it sounds pretty much identical to the recent banned Facebook ads citing the user’s age as a barrier to entry. And that’s true. But the secret is to make the reader feel as if they’ve stumbled across a mystery freebie while carefully avoiding any suggestion that you’re the actual owner of the target site. Sound a little shady? Yep, so is a large segment of the shit that actually works for affiliates in the CPA space.

Another favourite tactic of mine is to hijack the inferiority complex to make the user click-through to where I want them to be.

I’ll use Runescape as an example. Here is a game where you can register a character and engage with thousands of other users in a sprawling virtual world. I’m no market research wizard, but what can I say for sure about a lot of Runescape players? They’re a bunch of pansy dicks who don’t like to be made to feel inferior.

That said, I thought it’d be a good idea to design a PPV creative that would be specifically catered for Runescape users persuading them to register on the closest matching gaming offer I could find.

The general gist of the headline was…

“There’s A Reason The Top Runescape Players Are Flocking To [My Offer Name Here]”

…But I can’t tell you until you click through and see it for yourself”

I was hoping to spark an immediate reaction where firstly, the player doesn’t like being left in the dark or having it implied that he’s not good at Runescape. And secondly, there’s the inquisitive nature of wanting to know more about a new game that ranks well with the same crowd.

Given that so many of the Runescape crowd are young, retarded, and living in cloud cuckoo land, you can have a field day with your creatives until you’re driving a decent amount of clicks and conversions.

I’m using Runescape and the gaming niche as a convenient example – because I know it won’t make you much money if you rip it like several people did with the last post. But the real trick is to start thinking outside the box. Look at how you could apply the same logic to offers with higher payouts and higher traffic.

If you’re new to PPV, I would strongly recommend you learn to walk before you try to run. Just choose one target site. Maybe even one page within it.

Search for a suitable offer that can be wedged on to the back of your target for maximum relevancy. Nothing grabs the user’s attention like a creative that asks them whether they really want to do what they’re about to do, but maybe that’s a method for a whole new post…

As I’ve said all along, when you’re advertising with PPV, you need to understand the way that interruption marketing works. While the last post detailed a method of interrupting the user with something visually extravagant and attention catching, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Sometimes you can exploit interruption marketing by making sure the user doesn’t even know that there’s been an interruption. Blend in with your target source and produce creatives that sit well with the user’s natural navigation through the target site. I’m not going to go in to specifics, but when I’m planning my PPV campaigns, I like to ask myself three questions about the targets I’m adding.

1. Why is the user on this page?
2. Where is the user most likely to click next?
3. Where did the user come from?

If you can begin to paint a picture of the user’s browsing habits, you can design a creative that captures their attention so much more readily. Headline phrases like “Before you…” and “Now that you’ve…” play a key role in my PPV creatives and if you plug your brain in, you can probably put two and two together to see why. Happy hunting.