PPV 101: A Step-by-Step Campaign Walkthrough

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2 Section 1: The Appetizer Introduction In this guide we are going to go step-by-step through setting up an Affiliate campaign on PPV. The purpose of this guide is to teach you how to put together a PPV campaign the right way. It is not to give you a guaranteed profitable campaign right out of the box. Anyone claiming to give you such a thing is either lying, or the method will be so completely saturated with traffic within 24 hours that it is not profitable anymore. The only way to be profitable in Affiliate Marketing is to learn how to think for yourself, so that you can go out and become the innovator that everyone else is trying to copy. You can use this guide and the campaign we re about to create as a blueprint, or a foundation to build on. Frequently Asked Questions about Affiliate Marketing For many of you reading this guide, Affiliate Marketing will be something new for you. Let s go over some of the basics right now, just so we have our bases covered before getting into the meat and potatoes of the guide. If you already know this stuff, then by all means, skip ahead to the next section of the guide where I walk you through setting up a campaign, step-by-step. What is Affiliate Marketing? Affiliate Marketing is a technique used by Advertisers and Companies to promote their products online. They do this by paying a group of independent marketers, called Affiliates, to send new customers to their websites. There are two main types of Affiliate Marketing, Cost-Per-Sale (CPS) and Cost-Per-Action (CPA). An example of a CPS program is Amazon.com s Associates Program. They give you a special Affiliate Link to give to other people, and when they click through your link to get to Amazon and make a purchase, you get a percentage of the total sale amount as your commission (or payout ). An example of a CPA program (or offer ) is Netflix. If you are promoting Netflix, you will still get an Affiliate Link to give to people. However, instead of making a purchase from an online store like Amazon, they are signing up for the Netflix DVD Rental service. For each user that signs up for Netflix through your Affiliate Link, you will receive a set payout. In this example, for Netflix, the payout would be around $17. There are thousands of different CPA offers out Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 2 of 22

3 there, and each one has a different payout amount and different requirements to receive that payout. What is an Affiliate Network? An Affiliate Network is the company that goes between you (the Affiliate) and the Advertiser (like Netflix, for example). The main role of the Affiliate Network is to track all of the sales and conversions you have generated for each Affiliate Offer, and making sure that you get paid for your work. They also handle the flow of the money from the Advertiser to you. They can also be very helpful in training you and keeping you on top of trends in the industry by assigning you an Affiliate Manager. What is an Affiliate Manager? An Affiliate Manager works for an Affiliate Network, and they act as your Account Manager. They handle everything from getting you approved for offers, giving you payout raises (or bumps ), and even giving you marketing advice and helping to grow your campaigns. How much money can I make with Affiliate Marketing? You can make an unbelievable amount of money with Affiliate Marketing. The only limit is how hard you are willing to work. It is not easy, it is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but it is a business. You need to have that mindset from the very beginning. If you do, and you focus and work hard, it is entirely possible to make a six-figure income (many times over) with Affiliate Marketing. Frequently Asked Questions about PPV What is PPV? PPV is short for pay-per-view; also known as CPV, cost-per-view, or contextual marketing. It is one of the fastest-growing ways to market Affiliate Offers of the last couple of years. The reason it is so popular is that you can get views (visitors to your website or affiliate offer) for pennies, or even fractions of a penny. The opportunities to market Affiliate products, your website, or just about anything else are endless. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 3 of 22

4 How does PPV work? PPV works by generating new browser windows (or pop-ups) on the user s computer. It does this through a piece of software (called a client) that the user downloads to get access to content online such as games, screensavers, or videos. The users keep the software on their computer (and keep seeing the ads) because they see it is a trade-off for getting the content for free. Do pop-up blockers block my ads on PPV? In a word: no. Pop-up blockers are designed to stop pop-ups that are generated by the website that a user is viewing through their browser (like Internet Explorer, FireFox, or Safari). The PPV software actually opens up a new browser window and then loads your website, so it s just like if the user opened a new browser themselves and then typed in your address. Testing out different offers, targets, and landing pages is how you will get the best results and make the most money from PPV. Do I need to use a Landing Page with PPV? Nope! One of the best things about PPV is that it can be very quick to set up a campaign compared to PPC or other marketing methods. You can direct link to Affiliate Offers all you want. That being said, sometimes using a Landing Page will produce better results, but not all the time, and it is certainly not a requirement. Is there any Quality Score with PPV? Nope! Google Adwords users are always worried about their Quality Score, because without a good one there is little to no chance of being successful. Luckily, in PPV, there is no such thing as a Quality Score or the User Experience. PPV networks serve ads. That s it. As long as they don t have any objectionable content in them, they should get approved and will not be penalized for being thin sites. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 4 of 22

5 Before You Do Anything Else The absolute first thing you need to do is sign up for accounts for at least one Affiliate Network and one PPV network. I highly recommend that you sign up for GetAds affiliate network, which you can do here, and the DirectCPV PPV network, which you can do here. Why these particular networks? Well for starters I am an Affiliate Manager for GetAds, so I can get you good payouts on offers and give you ongoing tips and advice if we work together. Also, I am very familiar with DirectCPV and have good contacts over there, and if you sign up and give them the coupon code BR25, you can get a $25 credit for signing up (once you ve made your initial deposit of $100 into your account). I suggest that you sign up for these now, because it can take a day or two before you get accepted and ready to rock. I also highly suggest that you sign up for an account at AffExpert. This is a PPV / PPC tools site that will give you access to a number of awesome time savers, the most important being a URL Scraper for setting up your campaigns. This is certainly not a requirement to follow this guide, but it does make things a lot easier and can have a very positive effect on your income. You can sign up for AffExpert here. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 5 of 22

6 Section 2: The Meat and Potatoes Step-by-Step PPV to CPA Campaign Walkthrough I am a firm believer that the easiest way to learn something is to do it. So without further ado, let s jump into creating a campaign with PPV and launching it. Step 1: Offer Selection The first thing I need to do is select an offer. I am going to use a dating offer for this example, because they are fairly easy to convert and there are a lot of potential targets. The specific offer I am going to use is Singlesnet 25+ from the GetAds affiliate network. It pays out $3.50 per conversion, which is a free sign up for an account. Here is a screenshot of the offer page: Now that I have selected my offer, I need to pull my special Affiliate Tracking Link from the Affiliate Network. Since my offer is from GetAds, I am going to login to my Affiliate Panel there. Here is what the Affiliate Panel looks like: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 6 of 22

7 Remember to double-check that the campaign you are promoting accepts PPV or Contextual traffic. You can see above under the Special Instructions that this one does accept Contextual. At the bottom of the page, you will see a link labeled Creative Tracking Link. This is the link we are going to copy and paste into Notepad so we will have access to it later: Most affiliate links you see will follow a similar format. It has unique numbers for the Campaign ID, your unique Affiliate ID, and also a place for you to put in a Sub ID for tracking purposes. The Sub ID almost always comes at the end of the tracking link (as you can see here SID= stands for Sub ID). Now that we have our affiliate link, it s time to move on to the next step. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 7 of 22

8 Step 2: Setup Tracking Tracking is extremely important any time that you are paying for traffic. In fact, it s important even if you are getting traffic for free. Unless you are tracking everything and you can find out where your conversions and sales are coming from, you will be essentially flying blind. The only way to increase your profits, and take a non-profiting campaign into profit, is to zero in on what is working and cut out everything that isn t working. To do this, we are going to use a free, open-source affiliate tracking software package called Prosper202. The installation of Prosper202 is beyond the scope of this guide, but there is great information on the process here: On the other hand, if you are experienced with servers, FTP, and setting up a MySQL database, then you can download and install Prosper202 for free from here: Here is what the 202 dashboard looks like: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 8 of 22

9 You ll notice that I ve got my offer and traffic source blacked out in this screenshot. Am I being stingy? Not really. The reason I blacked it out is that if I showed it to you, the first thing you would do is run out and duplicate the campaign. So would everyone else reading this book. The targets would then get ultra-competitive, people would bid outrageous prices for traffic, and within a couple days the offer wouldn t be profitable anymore for anybody. Then you would be ing me telling me that my guide doesn t work There s a lesson to be learned here: when you find your own offers that are working, don t tell people about them. At least don t give them the exact details. I don t care how well you know these people or if they are your good friends, once you let the cat out of the bag it s impossible to put it back in. You will be back to the drawing board on a new campaign quicker than you would believe. Ok, back on track. Now that you have your Prosper202 installation ready to go, get logged in to it and go to the Setup tab. You will see under the Setup tab, there are 8 different options. You are going to go through these in order to get things set up. The first one is PPC Accounts. In our case, it is really going to be a PPV Account, but it doesn t matter they both work the same. You are going to add your PPV Network first, for example DirectCPV, then your account name at that network, for example ppvuser123. The next option is Aff Networks. Here you just add the name of the network you are using, for example, GetAds. Option #3 is Aff Campaigns. Here is where we put in our affiliate link that we copied to Notepad earlier. Select your affiliate network from the dropdown box, then type in the name of the campaign. I m going to put in Singlesnet 25+. For the Rotate Urls option, select No. The Affiliate URL is where we paste in our affiliate link from Notepad. After you ve pasted it in, you need to manually type in **subid++ at the end of the link (without the quotes), right after the SID=. This will tell 202 where in the link your Sub ID is supposed to go, just in case it s not at the end. The next field is for your Payout $. I m going to put in $3.50. Finally, there is a dropdown box to select whether you would like Cloaking or not. Cloaking attempts to hide your traffic source from the Affiliate Network, but it also slows down the redirect time a little bit. Usually for PPV I select No, because I want my link to load as quickly as possible. Here is what it all should look like when you are finished with this page: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 9 of 22

10 If it all looks good, then go ahead and click the Add button. Moving forward, since we are going to be direct linking this campaign (we won t be using a Landing Page), we can skip over steps #4-6 on the Setup tab. That brings us directly to step #7, Get Links. This is where we are going to get your modified Affiliate Link. This is the link that will send the user through your tracking software, which is completely invisible to them, and then forward them on to the Offer Page. The first field on the #7 Get Links page is Get Text Ad Code For, and the 2 selections are Direct Link Setup, or Simple Landing Page Setup and Advanced Landing Page Setup. The first option should be selected by default, go ahead and leave it selected. The next field is Affiliate Network. I select GetAds. Then for Campaign, I select the one that I just created, Singlesnet $3.50. For Method of Promotion, I select Direct Linking. For Cloaking, I leave it as Campaign Default On/Off because I already selected Off when I setup the campaign. For PPC Network, I choose DirectCPV, and for the PPC Account, I select my username (yours is whatever you setup a few steps back). Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 10 of 22

11 Finally, we set the Max CPC. This is the amount that we are going to be bidding per click, or in PPV, per view. You can set this at whatever you think will be the average CPV (cost-per-view) that you will be paying. I m just going to put in $0.05 (5 cents), because that s about the max that I m willing to pay. Don t worry if this number isn t exactly what you end up paying, you can update it later. This is what it looks like when I m ready to generate the Tracking Link: If you are all ready, go ahead and click Generate Tracking Link. This will give you the new Tracking Link that we are going to use in our PPV campaign. It should look like this: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 11 of 22

12 The final step to setting up your campaign is to get your tracking pixel placed with the network. This is what tells your Prosper202 that you have generated a lead. To set this up, go to #8 Get Postback/Pixel, the last option on your Setup tab. You will see two options on this page: Simple Global Tracking Pixel and Simple Global Post Back URL. They both do the same thing, but you want to choose one or the other, not both! If you do both, then you will see twice as many conversions in Prosper202 as you are actually getting. You can choose whichever option you like. Personally, I like the post back method better, but not every network can accept it. Ask your Affiliate Manager to be sure. Almost every network can accept an image pixel. Next, all you have to do is copy your pixel or post back URL, and paste it into an to your Affiliate Manager and tell them which campaign you want to have it placed on. Alternatively, with some networks you can just place the pixel yourself from your affiliate panel, but it s usually a good idea to check with your A.M. to make sure that it was placed properly. Congratulations! You just setup tracking with Prosper202! Let s move on to the next step. Step 3: Find Your Targets Before I can take my campaign to the PPV network, I have to research my targets. There are several options for targeting on PPV, including URLs, Keywords, Categories, and Run-Of- Network (RON). I am going to use the URL targeting method, as it is the most precise method and the best for optimizing your campaigns after the fact. So where do we get these URLs to target? From Google of course! The first step to finding the correct URLs to target is getting some good keywords. For this, I will use the Google External Keyword Tool. It s free to use, and you don t need any type of Google Account to access it. When I pull up the Keyword Tool, it will ask me for a Word or phrase. You can put in several. Since I know that my Singlesnet 25+ offer is a dating offer, I m going to put in the obvious choice dating, and then hit the Search button. After thinking for a minute, the tool will give you a list of about 100 dating-related keywords. This will be more than enough for our research. Select them all and click the Download button to save the list to your computer. Now for the actual URL research, there are two ways to do it: the manual way and the automated way. Remember when I recommended that you sign up for AffExpert? This is where that comes into play. If you are doing this manually, what you will want to do is take Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 12 of 22

13 these keywords, one by one, and do a standard Google search for them. On the search results page, you have URLs. There are 10 organic results, and several paid results as well. The manual method is to copy and paste each one of these URLs one by one into either Notepad or an Excel spreadsheet. Then you move on to the second page of results, and copy all the URLs there. Next you rinse and repeat with as many of those keywords as you have the desire to do. This is the most time-consuming part of the process. Sound like too much work? Well the automated way is a lot easier. If you are an AffExpert member, all you have to do is sign in, go to the URL Scraper tool, paste your entire keyword list into the box, select how many URLs you want for each keyword, and whether you want it to scrape Google, Yahoo, Bing, or all 3 at once, and hit go. Now AffExpert goes out and gathers (or scrapes ) all the URLs for you, and puts them into a nice list that you can download. This can give you several hundred or even a few thousand results, all in a matter of seconds. This is the tool that I personally use on every single PPV campaign that I set up. I wouldn t recommend it to you otherwise. Since I m an AffExpert member, I went ahead and scraped the URLs for all the keywords that I harvested from the Google tool. I only selected 10 results for each keywords term on each of the Big 3 search engines, and I ended up with 1,844 URLs! Check out the results below: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 13 of 22

14 Whether you have used the manual method or the automated method, you should now have a list of URLs to target for this campaign. Of course we don t know which ones are going to be profitable or not, that s why we are going to test them all and track our results using Prosper202. It may seem like a lot of work on the front end to set things up, and it is. But my hard work will pay off once I have the traffic coming in and I can start fine-tuning things and seeing how much money there is to make with the campaign! Step 4: Creating the campaign at the PPV Network Now that we ve done all the research for our targets, we are ready to set up the campaign on the actual PPV network. For this campaign, I m going to be using DirectCPV. I like DirectCPV for a couple of reasons, but the main one is that they display ads in a full-screen window instead of Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 14 of 22

15 the smaller 750x550 or 800x600 that most other PPV networks use. This is good because you can see the entire offer page right away, instead of only seeing a portion of it. Once I ve logged into DirectCPV, I m going to click on Create New Campaign, and then Create URL Campaign. On the next page, I m going to put in my campaign name Singlesnet, the Daily Budget (I m going to start with $10.00 per day) and select the countries that I am targeting. You can leave the Frequency Cap at 1/24. Here s what it looks like: On the next page, you put in the Destination URL. For this, we are going to use the Tracking Link that we created in Prosper202, which looks like this: Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 15 of 22

16 We are also going to add the token,,vurl-- at the end of the link. This tells DirectCPV to pass the URL on to Prosper202, so we can see where our conversions are coming from. Every PPV network has a slightly different method of passing these URLs, so make sure you know how it s done or else you will be flying blind. You can see that there are some other tokens that you can use for your Sub ID instead, but I like to use {{vurl}} because it shows the actual URL that was being viewed when the display (and the conversion) was created. That means that if I am bidding on a top level domain like eharmony.com, but I see that all of my signups are coming from a deep page like eharmony.com/signup, then I can create a new target for eharmony.com/signup and get cheaper views (since there is less competition). This is a great way to optimize your campaigns for higher profit. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 16 of 22

17 The next step is very simple, all we do is copy our URL target list that we have gathered and paste it into the box as shown below: Hit Save and Continue when you have pasted in all of your URLs and then it s on to the next step, setting your bid prices. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 17 of 22

18 Setting your bid prices is going to be easy at first, because we are simply going to bid the lowest possible amount on all the URLs, just to start with. For DirectCPV, that minimum bid amount is $0.010, or one penny. The reason that I recommend starting with the minimum is that we don t know what the competition level is for these URLs yet, and you don t want to pay any more than you have to for the traffic. Go ahead and hit Save to continue on. Technically, your campaign is now created, but we are going to do one more step before we are ready to go. Click on your campaign name ( Singlesnet 25+ in my case) from the Manage Campaigns screen that you are now on. This will take you to the Edit URL Campaign screen. It also should be showing the first 25 of your targets. After a second, it will load in your Rank and the Other Bids for each URL. This is showing your rank as it relates to the competition for each target. If you are Rank #1, then great, there s nothing to worry about. That means that you are the only one bidding on that URL and you can get it for 1 penny per view. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 18 of 22

19 If there are competitors showing, it will show you the first few bids that are at the top of the list. You can see here for this eharmony.com URL that I am not even ranked at all, meaning I will get no traffic: In the other bids, I can see that the top 4 bids are $0.756, $0.753, $0.752, and $ Now take it from me, paying 75 cents for a single view is ridiculous. There are obviously a lot of competitors on this URL who have no idea what they are doing. It s not worth it to me to match the price, so I m just going to leave this one as-is. Everybody is going to have their own rule of thumb for how much they want to pay for a view. For me personally, I don t like paying more than about $0.05 per view (that s 5 cents). I m not saying that you should never ever pay more than that, but you have to know exactly what you are doing or else you are going to blow through your budget in no time at all, with very little to show for it. What you want to do now is scan down through your list, and see which URLs you are being outbid on. If there are any that you can bid to the #1 spot without spending more than $0.05, then check the box for that URL. Once you are all the way through the page, you can click the Make My Bid Highest button, and it will automatically raise all of your bids on the checked URLs to the #1 spot. Once you have put in your competing bids, your campaign is launched and waiting for approval! Congratulations! All you have to do now is wait for your campaign to be approved. You should receive an within hours telling you that your landing page was either accepted or rejected, and your URL targets will be accepted or rejected in a different . Once you receive both of those, your campaign is now live and you are receiving views. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 19 of 22

20 Step 5: Testing and Optimizing Your Campaign So your campaign has been launched, now what? This is where a lot of beginners get stuck because they end up spending too much money, only getting a few conversions (if any); they get frustrated and give up. They decide that PPV doesn t work, and they move on to the next traffic source on their list. Setting up the campaign is only half of the battle. The most important part comes after you have received some traffic. The first part of this next step is to get your conversion data into Prosper202. If you were able to get your Prosper202 pixel or post back URL placed with your Affiliate Network (we covered this back in Step 2: Setup Tracking), then this step should be automatically done for you. Your conversions and clicks should both update in real time. On the other hand, if you weren t able to get the pixel placed, it s no problem; we will just have to manually import the Sub IDs that were converted. To do this, the first step is to login to your affiliate network and go to your stats page. The report you are looking for is called a Sub ID Report. Pull this report, and it should show you the clicks / views you received on the campaign and each one will have a unique numerical Sub ID next to it. We don t need to download all of these. We are only interested in the ones that generated a conversion or lead. You can either use the options on the stats page or download them to Excel and use that to narrow down to the converted leads. Once you have the Sub ID s for the converted leads, simply select them all and copy them. Finally, we will login to your Prosper202 installation, go to the Update tab, paste them into the Sub IDs box, and click the Update Subids button. Now your conversions are all uploaded into Prosper202! Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 20 of 22

21 Now we are ready to move on to analyzing your data, making decisions, and optimizing your campaign. Here are the steps I follow First of all, when you launch a campaign, you want to spend about 2 times to 3 times the payout of the offer for the initif the offer payout is $5, then you want to spend approximately $10 - $15 on the initial test phase. Once this amount has been spent, it is time to analyze what your data is telling you. For me personally, after the initial testing phase, if I haven't received any conversions at all, I usually dump the current strategy and go back to the drawing board. That's -100% ROI, and that's going to be hard to overcome without a drastically different strategy. This means targeting a different demographic, different set of URLs, maybe a landing page instead of direct linking, etc. To be clear, I am not saying that I will never spend more than $20 testing a campaign; I just won t spend more than $20 doing the same thing. If I want to test it again with different variables, then I go back and start over. If you are anywhere from -50% ROI to 0% ROI (break-even), then you should be able to profit with optimization. The easiest way to optimize your campaign is to find out which URLs are getting you the conversions. Login to Prosper202, then click the Analyze tab, then click the Keywords option (keywords in our case are actually URLs, since we are doing PPV). Now click on the ROI column to sort the URLs but ROI. It s fun to look at the Green URLs, this means that those are profitable and making money! But what we want to focus on is where we are losing money. Sort your list so that the lowest ROI is at the top. A lot of times the bottom few URLs will have sucked up a huge amount of your testing budget, and will have no conversions to show for it. So guess what we do? Log back into DirectCPV and delete those suckers! With some PPV networks, you can pause targets so that you can turn them back on later, but in DirectCPV you just have to delete them and add them back if you ever want them again. Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 21 of 22

22 Now with those budget killers removed from your campaign, you are going to see a huge improvement in your ROI. In a lot of my campaigns, this one simple optimization step will take you from negative or break-even into a profitable campaign! A lot of people are hesitant to delete these URLs because they are giving you the majority of your views. But who cares how many views you are getting if they are not converting? Once you have a profitable campaign going, then you can either look at ways to scale the campaign or you can move on to the next campaign and start the process over again. You are not going to reach your income goals in one campaign (or if you do, you are extremely lucky). The best part about this process is that it can be repeated over and over again. So you might have one campaign making you $50 a day, another making $20 a day, and another making $30 a day. Put those together and you have $100 a day, which is $3,000 a month, which is enough to replace most Americans full-time income. This is not going to be easy, it is hard work. It can be frustrating. You will want to give up at some point. But if you stick with it and follow these steps, you can easily make money with PPV and CPA campaigns. Plus, this is just the beginning. There is so much more you can do once you get things rolling, the sky is truly the limit. Now go make some money! Copyright 2010 Josh Todd Page 22 of 22