ppv traffic

Traffic Sources Based On Experience

November 26th, 2012
7Search, Affiliate Marketing, LeadImpact, POF, PPV, SiteScout, Traffic Sources
42
17,877 views

There are a ton of different traffic sources out there you can run your affiliate marketing campaigns on and one of the easiest things you can do is completely overwhelm yourself by trying to run campaigns at all of them at the same time. I think it’s really important that you choose a traffic source, test a spread of campaigns on that traffic source, optimize your campaigns, and then scale until you hit a ceiling. If you simply setup campaigns on a bunch of different traffic sources all at once you are going to spread yourself too thin. So, what traffic sources do I suggest focusing on based on your experience as an affiliate marketer?

I’ve broken down your possible experience level into four different levels. Those levels are Freshmen, Sophomore, Junior, and Senior. Here is an explanation of each level and one traffic source I suggest based on that level. Remember, these are simply my suggestions based on my experiences working with my publishers. You should look into different traffic sources on your own, but these are the ones I suggest.

Freshmen (“Newbie”)

There is a pretty large learning curve when you first start affiliate marketing. You will lose money at first and I think it is important that you learn as much as you can while losing as little as possible, which I am sure most people would agree with. The main concepts with any affiliate campaign are setting up, optimizing, and scaling. The traffic source that I think makes this the easiest and has the lowest barrier of entry is 7Search.

Setting up a 7Search campaign is really simple and the minimum deposit to get started is just $25. They have a great keyword tool that makes it easy to find keywords that you can get traffic from. By starting out using a search PPC ad network you are assuring you will get traffic to your affiliate links no matter what (well, as long as you’re spending money). Also, 7Search has a cool feature that will let you blacklist bad performing sources so you can optimize your campaign.

If you’re brand new to affiliate marketing I suggest “getting your feet wet” with 7Search. Once you have some experience setting up a campaign and you have a few profitable 7Search campaigns running then I suggest you give Plenty of Fish Ads a try.

Sophomore

Two of the most “affiliate friendly” ad networks are 7Search and Plenty of Fish (POF). One of the main reasons I like to use both of them is that you can easily create a campaign by direct linking using your affiliate link. Most traffic sources are getting strict and disapproving direct affiliate links, but 7Search and POF welcome them. So, within a few minutes you can have some traffic going to your affiliate link.

With POF Ads you are advertising on the Plenty of Fish dating website. They have millions of users from throughout the world. Before you get started advertising, I suggest signing up at POF.com and taking a look around. You will see banner advertisements throughout the website. By far, the best offers to promote on Plenty of Fish are dating campaigns. Once you’ve taken a look through POF you can sign up for their advertising service at ads.pof.com.

POF Campaign Articles

Plenty of Fish ads use banners to drive traffic to your links. You bid on that traffic using a CPM model. Basically, with CPM you are bidding per 1,000 impressions. It’s a bit different than the PPC model 7Search has, but it’s easy to get the hang of. You want to aim for a 0.1% CTR or as close to it as you can get it. At a 0.1% CTR your CPM bid is essentially a CPC bid.

You can get quite a bit more traffic from POF than 7Search and the quality of the traffic seems to be much better. You can scale your campaigns bigger and make more money as well. POF is a great traffic source for a moderately experienced affiliate marketer. Once you have a grasp of the CPM bidding platform and have some successful POF campaigns going I would suggest doing some research on PPV traffic.

Junior

One type of traffic that I have seen great results with for years now is PPV traffic and the source that I have seen the most consistent results with is LeadImpact. LeadImpact is a PPV network that serves ads through pop ups which are displayed to users who install their adware. I have more information on how PPV works in my LeadImpact review. The reason I like LeadImpact over similar networks is that they are pretty quick to respond to questions, have a moderate minimum deposit, decent traffic volume, and pretty good quality. You can get their traffic to convert and it’s easy to scale not only on LeadImpact, but by copying your campaign over to other PPV networks you can get extra traffic that way as well.

PPV traffic is fun to work with and can be very profitable if done right. You’re paying for every single view and your CPM will end up being a lot more than what you’d pay on POF, but you’re guaranteeing yourself “clicks” and with a good offer or landing page, you can see a great ROI.

Senior (“Super Affiliate”)

If you have mastered the methods listed above then I suggest making way to into the king of traffic, media buying. I have discussed media buying before and although I do not have a lot of experience with it myself, I have helped guide my publishers into producing some very successful media buy campaigns. You can do your own media buy on basically any website, but the network that I suggest for running your initial campaigns through is SiteScout. The minimum deposit to get started is just $500 and they have a very large inventory of websites you can run traffic on using a ton of different banner placements. If you’re at this stage of your affiliate marketing career you should already have done some research on media buying, but I suggest signing up at SiteScout and giving it a try!

Based on your experience in affiliate marketing, those 4 different traffic sources should help get you driving some traffic you will be comfortable with. Each traffic source is a different “traffic method” for the most part. 7Search is Search PPC, POF is considered Social or Banner Display traffic, LeadImpact is PPV or Pop Ups, and SiteScout is specifically Banner Display. Being able to work with a range of traffic sources and methods is what is going to allow you to make the most money possible and the ability to do that is completely dependent on your experience.

So, setup some campaigns, run some traffic, and let’s make some money!

Tracking Keywords and URLs with DirectCPV

March 16th, 2012
Affiliate Marketing, PPV, Traffic Sources
12
9,352 views

A lot of my PeerFly publishers are using DirectCPV right now and although I do not think it is the best PPV network, they do have traffic and there are some people running very successful campaigns with them. One issue they all seem to be having right now is that the pixel option with the new DirectCPV interface does not seem to work. It’s easy to see how this could be an issue when you go to optimize your campaign, but luckily there is another option that is just as good. Instead of placing the tracking pixel on PeerFly, you can simply pass their keyword/url variables into your PeerFly long link.

DirectCPV Destination URL

When you are setting up your Default landing page on DirectCPV they give you four variables that you can pass into your affiliate link. Well, just like when you setup a 7Search campaign, you can pass these variables into your long link and then when you view your Reports on PeerFly you can see a complete breakdown based on those SubIDs.

The four different variables you can pass are:

$esc.url($query.keyword)
${query.trafficProvider.key}
$esc.url($query.url)
$esc.url($matched.categoryName)

If you are looking at that and thinking, “well, that’s confusing”, I agree with you. I am not sure why DirectCPV decided to make them complicated variables when they could have done something as simple as %KEYWORD%, but they did. Luckily, passing these into your link is simple and you don’t even need them all.

With PPV traffic I suggest bidding on URLs rather than keywords. If you are bidding on URLs then you should pass the $esc.url($query.url) variable into your first subid on PeerFly. If you are bidding on keywords then you should pass the $esc.url($query.keyword) variable into the first subid. I suggest passing the ${query.trafficProvider.key} variable into the second subid spot. I don’t really pay attention to categories, so I would ignore the last variable.

If you are bidding on URLs then the subid section of your PeerFly Long Link would look like:

subid=$esc.url($query.url)&subid2=${query.trafficProvider.key}&subid3=&email=

Simply copy and paste that into DirectCPV as your Destination URL and you’re all set! Once you start generating traffic you can go to your PeerFly Reports page and see a complete breakdown showing you which URLs you are getting conversions on and which ones you are not.

Pretty simple right? Let me know if you have any questions. I hope to get a DirectCPV case study up done soon and I’ll be mailing it to my Affiliate Manager Exclusive subscribers. Make sure you get on my list! :)

Free PPV Advice From PPV Forum CPVDen.com

June 4th, 2011
Affiliate Marketing, PPV
6
17,197 views

I do not usually find a lot of time to be active on forums. Typically, the guy from PeerFly that everyone sees on forums is Corey, but lately I have begun posting on the Contextual Marketing Community, CPV Den.

I first found CPV Den when I was searching Google for free PPV tools. I landed on their resources page and immediately started to look around. They have some really great free PPV tools that I found very useful:

There are some others they offer as well. Those ones in particular I liked. Well, after messing around with the tools for a little bit I found myself on the site forum.

Like the tools, the forum is also free to use. I skimmed through the threads and replies and found some very good posts with a lot of great information so I decided to register.

The forum has nearly 2,000 threads that have been created with about 11,200 posts and it’s all about PPV marketing! They cover newbie questions and answers, bidding strategies, working with Tracking202, landing page design, case studies, the different PPV networks, and much much more.

As I mentioned in my review of LeadImpact, PPV traffic is really doing well for our publishers at PeerFly. CPVDen.com is a free forum with a ton of great PPV advice. If you’re interested in testing some PPV campaigns or you are currently running some campaigns I definitely suggest you go look through the different PPV articles on CPV Den. It’s a great community with a lot of affiliate marketers trying to help each other out.

Check out CPV Den and let me know if you have any questions :)

LeadImpact PPV Review

April 9th, 2011
Affiliate Marketing, PPV, Traffic Sources
73
30,916 views

We have been getting a ton of PPV (pay per view) traffic at PeerFly lately so I thought it would be a good idea to introduce those who are not familiar with PPV traffic to PPV and one of my favorite PPV networks, LeadImpact.

What is PPV?

Since this is my first post about PPV I’ll give you a quick and dirty introduction to it. I you are familiar with PPV please feel free to skip to the next section of this post :)

For the most part, when affiliate marketers or affiliate managers are talking about PPV traffic they are talking about traffic coming from adware that users have downloaded and installed on their computer to gain access to free content or games. LeadImpact describes this directly on the Help section of their site:

People download our software (e.g. Hotbar, ClickPotato) to gain free, ad-supported access to a huge library of premium Web content. LeadImpact offers access to online games, videos, screensavers and software.

The visitors will see your ad in the form of a pop up. If you plan to run PPV traffic and have an extra computer sitting around, I highly suggest you install the adware (Hotbar.com) so you can see what the pop ups look like. I did this not long after I started testing some PPV campaigns and I immediately saw things that I could change to increase my click through and conversion rates.

Hint: by installing the adware you will also have the advantage of seeing what your competitors are doing right/wrong.

Why should you use LeadImpact?

There are many reasons why I like LeadImpact over some of the other top networks. Here is a list of the top 5 networks in my opinion:

Trafficvance
LeadImpact
MediaTraffic
DirectCPV
AdOn

Obviously one of the most important aspects is the traffic quality and LeadImpact has pretty good traffic quality. It’s not as good as Trafficvance, but Trafficvance has a minimum $1,000 deposit and you have to had a referral from someone spending at least $50 a day on their network. LeadImpact has a minimum deposit of just $200 and does not require a referral.

The minimum bid on LeadImpact is $0.015-$0.035 per view, depending on the category your promotion falls under. Once you go through your $200 initial deposit the minimum refill deposit is just $20. So, I like to use LeadImpact as a starting place for testing campaigns and depending on the results, may transfer the campaign to another network as well.

LeadImpact Window Size

A very important thing to keep in mind when promoting using PPV is the size of the window you will be promoting in. All PPV networks besides DirectCPV have a set window size for their pop ups. With LeadImpact, the view-able space in the pop up window (the amount of space you have to work with) is 775×400. If you install the adware on your computer you can easily test your landing page to see how it looks in the pop up window.

In conclusion, I highly suggest you give LeadImpact a try. PPV traffic has proven to perform really well with a majority of our offers and I know hundreds of affiliates who are doing really well with LeadImpact on their PPV campaigns. If you have any questions about LeadImpact or PPV in general please feel free to contact me or post them below. I enjoy talking about PPV and will do what I can to help you get a profitable campaign up :)