Expectations vs Reality for PPV Marketing

[neerajkulkarni]

Hi guys. I have watched a few webinars and videos about PPV marketing and the targeting stuff. They all make it sound so simple and easy.

Most of them stress the point that we are marketing to the interested people for pennies whereas others are spending dollars for the same traffic.

That's a good point but since we are hindering the smooth flow of a person surfing the web, chances are he is more inclined towards closing the pop-up or pop-under window and is not interested in whatever we have to offer.

Some videos also show hypothetical examples of how many visitors we may get and compare it with the amount spent and per action dollar value. It all seems highly profitable.

Can we expect the usual conversion rate of say 1% to 2% or the usual conversion rates are below that?

 

[chiruraaj]

Hi Neeraj,

We cannot compare it directly to ppc as in ppc people click our ads which means that they were interested in our ad. Here, it is more like impressions. Having said that, if you give the user what he is looking for you can sure make good money with ppv. the conversion rates for different offers are going to be different. Like for eg you may get 2 to 3 conversion per 100 pop if its a simple 3-4 field form submission offer, but you can expect that in a sale type offer which pays in excess of 20$. it is all about being proftable at the end.

 

[neerajkulkarni]

Hi Neeraj,

We cannot compare it directly to ppc as in ppc people click our ads which means that they were interested in our ad. Here, it is more like impressions. Having said that, if you give the user what he is looking for you can sure make good money with ppv. the conversion rates for different offers are going to be different. Like for eg you may get 2 to 3 conversion per 100 pop if its a simple 3-4 field form submission offer, but you can expect that in a sale type offer which pays in excess of 20$. it is all about being proftable at the end.

Thank you Chiruraaj for your reply.

Although I am only into email submit offers right now it still has 0 conversions. Impressions are over 1000+, Spent over $15 and all impressions coming from a handful of websites. But not even a single conversion. I have paused the campaign for now. Maybe I am missing something here I believe. Over 1000 impressions, url targeting (mostly deep), 1000+ urls loaded into the campaign.

I would be glad to hear your insights on this.

 

[bruceb]

PPV conversions 0% after 1000's of impressions and multi pop's.

Neeraj, I am also in the same setup as you. 1000's of impressions for both url's (140) and keywords (300+). I have tested 2 pops for each adgroup. I have spent $60+ and have no conversions. I also have a 2nd campaign with no conversions with 4 different test pops tested over 9 days and over $90 spent. I am running out of money. I read a thread that stated you need to spend over $600 to get a good test and make that campaign running profitable. I was hoping to find a small % conversions after several days but it is not in the cards for me.

I am looking for a coach/mentor that could help me with this PPV conversion problem. I learn better hands on than reading.
Please send me a message if you are interested.

 

[johnnygood]

In general email submits are not best idea to start with. You may have hard times if it's you or offer that is not converting due to scrubs. I would advice to start with some lead gen to get your feet wet with PPV. If you have any exact questions feel free to post them or you can check demo of our software to see what people are advertising "demo"


Thanks,
Johnny

 

[brandsqueezed]

Of course there are people making money with PPV, but there are a lot more who are not.

I have been at PPV for about a year, on and off, and I have tested about 100 campaigns and failed to achieve much more than break even with any of them. I've put in about 1000 hours, had three mentors (one who did expert Q&A for this forum), joined four forums, purchased CPVlab for tracking and I subscribe to a VPS for serving my landing pages.

Many people say PPV is cheap but I regularly have cost per click pushing the dollar mark on non performing campaigns and it makes me wonder whether testing would make more sense using PPC and then try migration of successful campaigns to PPV.

I recently participated in a 30 day competition on another forum where a few dozen people went hard for a month building campaigns, many of them were PPV. Almost everyone lost money. I estimate that about 500 losing campaigns were built for about 3 or 4 successful ones. I put in about 150 hours so I estimate about 2000-5000 hours of non-income producing effort were expended building and tweaking campaigns during the period of the competition. Of course one can make an argument for the value of learning but learning only has value if you can get it to produce income and then it also has to pay you back for the time spent learning. Incidentally I spent just under $600 and earned about $150 during the period of the competition.

What I liked about the competition is that it attracted a mix of newbies and more experienced people. It's the best example of conscientious reality that I have seen so far and it has become my PPV reality check.

So there is certainly more to this game than meets the eye. In a nutshell you need to be prepared to build literally dozens of loss making campaigns before you hit one that works and even then you risk (as I have seen a number of times) a sudden change in the sentiment of traffic, almost as if someone hits the "lost interest switch". Then there are offers with unreliable urls which deliver your traffic to incorrect offers without you knowing, networks which scrub the life out of your hardwork and traffic sources which double up on their reported views and hence your payments.

 

[bruceb]

Thank You brandsqueezed, that was the best and most truthful answer I have ever seen in this forum.
I do have a new question for you. For CPA offers would you use PPC to promote? And what other considerations are worth mentioning here?
Just an FYI - I am a 2 week old newbe. Thanks BruceB

 

[johnnygood]

With PPC it depends on your source. On adwords it might be hard to push affiliate stuff. Bing should be ok if you will create content around it.

What is crucial as a new guy is to stick with one thing and play with untill you are confident to move on.

Brandsqueeze you are right but this is part of game you need to fail a lot in order to success. With experience you just lower amount of failures but you will never eliminate those.

Thanks,

 

[pjayaswal]

Neeraj, I am also in the same setup as you. 1000's of impressions for both url's (140) and keywords (300+). I have tested 2 pops for each adgroup. I have spent $60+ and have no conversions. I also have a 2nd campaign with no conversions with 4 different test pops tested over 9 days and over $90 spent. I am running out of money. I read a thread that stated you need to spend over $600 to get a good test and make that campaign running profitable..

Personally, I think you are spending too much to test one offer. There is no rule which says you need $600 to make an offer profitable - you can do it in under $50 too, at times. The general rule is that you spend 2x to 3x on an offer or 1x on a target to see if it converts. Otherwise you try to figure out what may be wrong with your targeting.... or you move on to the next offer. Not every offer will convert or even if it converts, can be made profitable.

So there is certainly more to this game than meets the eye. In a nutshell you need to be prepared to build literally dozens of loss making campaigns before you hit one that works .

I don't think there is much more than meets the eye! But the second part of your statement is true. And it is true because every traffic source has a learning curve and that learning comes only with experience - it cannot be taught.

What is crucial as a new guy is to stick with one thing and play with untill you are confident to move on.

This is the best piece of advice. As a newbie, we tend to give up on any traffic source too soon if it doesn't work. If one will just choose ONE traffic source and commit to it till you master it, success is inevitable!

Can we expect the usual conversion rate of say 1% to 2% or the usual conversion rates are below that?

Yes, we can expect even better conversion rates - eventually it all boils down to your targets, your LP (if you have one, and then your offer.

Hope this helps....

 

[johnnygood]

Yup it all depends with conversion focus on ROI instead of numbers between. CTR/CR/CPC/CPV those are numbers that should help you achieve positive ROI.

Don't make one mistake that I saw recently was kinda crucial ;P Jump on campaigns that are impossible to make work. Count what type of CTR/CR/EPC you need to get your campaign profitable.

Thanks,