Cost Per View Advertising

I’m surprised that so many people still haven’t heard of CPV or PPV traffic. It is one of the best and most cost effective marketing methods you can find. In this short guide I’ll describe what CPV is and how you can monetize this traffic source.

CPV (cost per view) or PPV (pay per view) is the same thing. As long as PPV term is associated with television, it’s more distinct to call it CPV or cost per view. But overall, it doesn’t really matter. What matter is how this whole traffic source works and how can you monetize it right.

What is CPV & How it Works?

Have you ever heard of popup or popunder traffic? Well, that’s exactly it. With CPV you pay per one impression as opposed to CPM where you pay per thousand impressions. Min. bids usually start at a penny, so you can calculate that CPM is quite pricy with this traffic, $10 or more. However, it pays off as long as you can super-target with this method and achieve better ROI than on media buys.

Here’s how it works.

A user downloads a screensaver, some kind of toolbar, those smileys and emoticons you see everywhere, or any kind of software online. Along with that software, which is installed on their computers, a user has to agree to additionally install the adware program. How clean or shady this is, I don’t know. Some companies have boxes pre-checked, so when you install software you want, you don’t even notice the checkbox that warns you about adware installation. So users often get it without knowing it.

Next thing, whenever they browse the web, they get popups or popunders with ads. And that’s where you come in. As advertiser, you can promote your ads and they’ll be shown to those users browsing the web. And no, the popups cannot be blocked as they are already delivered from the program running in the background. Whenever one popup is delivered, you pay a penny of more depending on your bid price.

Cost Per View Traffic Targeting

CPV is awesome, because it allows you can get targeted traffic. Now when it comes to targeting options themselves, CPV traffic has the least amount of them. You can’t choose demographics, you can’t choose sex, marital status like on Facebook. However, despite that, it works very well. Let me show you. You can have the following targeting options on CPV networks:

• RON Campaigns – You can have RON (run on network) campaigns and have the least amount of targeting. Basically your ads are displayed everywhere. It is not recommended. You’ll blow all your money in seconds probably.
• Categories – Again depending on the network, you can target one specific category. Like “women” or “weight loss” or “education”. So your ads will be displayed on sites that the CPV networks considers to fit your chosen category.
• URL Targeting – This is the #1 option everyone uses and say it produces the best results. And it does. You’ll have more successful campaigns with this option than others. Here, what you can do is simply pick a URL/website domain name and bid on it. Let’s say you pick wwe.com. Now, whenever people with adware installed on their computers, visit wwe.com you ad will show up. Can you imagine the targeting and traffic quality this way?

You can target not only broad URL’s like domain.com, but specific URL’s like domain.com/webpage.html. In this case, your ads will only be popped over when people visit that one page. Or you could target a folder, like domain.com/category/. In this case, your ad will popup when people visit that URL or any pages inside that folder, like domain.com/category/1.html , 2.html and so on…

Keyword Targeting – It’s another good option. Whenever people type in keywords into a search bar in any search engine, your ads will pop up. So you can bid on keywords, just like you bid on URL’s. Some people do find success with this method. It’s not as common, say bring you long term profit as not so many people are using this method.

Cost Per View Marketing Methods

Here’s a list of some marketing ideas you can use to make money with PPV traffic. They do work and make money, but as always, need testing, and losing money upfront until you make it work. One major tip before going with these CPV networks. Do NOT bid on super high traffic domains. PPV grandfather I call him, Gauher Chaudhry mentioned that he blew few thousand dollars in minutes while bidding on google.com or facebook.com, don’t remember exactly which. But point is, there’s so much traffic when you bid on these top domains, and audience is so wide, that it’s next to impossible to make it work. As a rule of thumb, don’t bid on sites that are less than 100 on alexa rank.

Ok so I mentioned to give you some advertising techniques with PPV and here they are.

• Bidding on Your Competitors – This one works quite well. Let’s say when Acai hit big, everyone was making money from it. What smarter folks did, they went to CPV networks, and bided on every advertiser on Google Adwords who was pushing the product. Just on those URL’s alone and it made tons of money for them. It still works for many markets, so just try it out.
• Picking One Big Target – Generally, with PPV as everyone says you need to pick a bunch of URL’s, usually you use URL scrapers for that. (There are free ones online, so do a search). Then you optimize campaign by eliminating losing targets. But the other way around is to pick one large target that gets loads of traffic. Let’s say match.com and promote all kinds of dating offers to see what sticks. You can rotate offers, landing pages, whatever and make sure you find something that works. In this case, you don’t lose as much money as there are fewer testing variables involved.
• Bidding on Order Pages – That’s a good one. Find your competitor sites and bid on pages that take them to order page. Whichever sales path it is. Traffic quality is going to be insane as these people already have credit cards in their hands. And you pop your offer over them and say: “hey, this is better, check it out” or something like that. Conversions can be 50%-100% on these.

Size Matters on PPV

One important thing to remember, popup sizes are limited on these networks. They’re not full screen popups. Some are 800×600 size, some are less. Some people use JavaScript codes to automatically resize the window to make it larger, but it’s against TOS of many networks, so don’t try that.

You can simply pick CPA offers where main offer fits on the popup window size. There are only few of those, but advertisers make even specific landing page versions for contextual traffic these days, so you can find something. Check those email or zip submits. Those are usually short pages and fit on the small screen.

But if you can’t find anything, use your landing page. There are places that sell landing pages. You can make them yourself if you know HTML or have dreamweaver, frontpage skills. Or you could hire someone to create them for you. Having landing page that presells the offer works in many cases. Although sometimes direct linking is better. You need to test here, sorry.

Tools You Need for CPV Traffic

This is an important one. You cannot have success without having the right system in place. And you get the right system, when you have the right tools. So let’s see what you need in order to succeed and scale with PPV traffic sources.

• Tracking System – You can track your campaigns with prosper202, tracking202 or BevoMedia tracker. These are all free systems. They’re good when you’re starting out. You need them, otherwise you won’t know what works. Don’t even start advertising without a tracking in place. It’s a waste of money right off the bat.
• URL Scraper – It’s one of the tools I mentioned. URL scraper simply goes on to search engines, and based on your keyphrase, extracts domain names, URL’s of top 100 or 1000 listings. Keep in mind that sometimes, the #1 listing is Wikipedia.org. It means you’ll be bidding on it, if you’re not checking your URL’s. There are paid ones out there, and free one is “Laser URL” I think.
• Offer Rotator – I personally use prosper202, so they have offer rotators there. It’s harder to implement, because you need to know a little coding, but it is possible for newbies. Just read their guides there. Or simply find scripts on forums. Some are as simple as 4 lines long. So you just enter as many URL’s of offer you need to rotate and you’re done. Rotating offers is one of the most crucial things on PPV. Rotate even the same offer from several networks, as lead scraping can result in big losses for you.
• Landing Page Rotator – Rotating LP’s just like rotating offers is very important. In this case, LP acts as your banner. And you do rotate many ads on PPC or media buys anyway. So, this is very important. You can find LP rotator on t202 site. Again, there might be some other tools out there, the 202 is what I use for my tracking.

That’s it, that’s basically all you need in order to succeed with cost per view traffic. Later, you’ll learn more and discover other smaller tricks, like going to quantast and looking at similar sites to the one you entered. Then bidding on those sites even though, they have completely different topic than what you need. In this case, visitor demographics are more important. Following your audience can produce much better results that just the exact topic of your offer.

Where to Start Advertising?

Ok, there are only a handful of CPV networks out there and I’ll try to quickly cover most of them here. Some are more expensive than others, so this can be an important factor when determining the best CPV network to go to.

• TrafficVance – As most agree, TV traffic is very high quality. They’re like premium PPV network. But price is $1000 per deposit. Plus, now I heard they only allow you to join if you were referred by someone. Maybe you can call them and get it anyway. Try it out.
• MediaTraffic – One of the older CPV ad networks. Traffic quality is good. Min. deposit is $200 at the time of writing. And bid prices start at $0.015.
• DirectCPV – This is new CPV network. Frankly, I haven’t used them much, but heard they’re good. Min. deposit is $50, so it’s a great place to start.
• AdOnNetwork – I didn’t have much success with AON, because I didn’t get a lot of traffic from them. But bids start from $0.005 so it’s something. And I heard people make great money with it. Definitely try them out. I think deposit is $50 as well.
• Clicksor – No experience with them. They’re mainly known for PPC type of contextual traffic. Serve banners, but also do CPV.
• LeadImpact
• CPV Marketplace
• Megaclick
• Adbrite – I’ve tried Adbrite before as PPC platform. No luck at all with them. Poor results most of the time and that’s what others are saying. But not sure about PPV, which they do offer.

Final Words

Cost per view advertising is very good and quality source to pay for traffic. ROI’s are usually better than with PPC or media buys. There is learning curve. You will fail. But if you stick at it, you will make money. It’s the #1 place I’d suggest to start for a newbie.

But make sure your targeting is good. Start with 10-50 specific sites. And scale from there. If you go too broad you’ll lose money. Also, as you see, the CPV is usually low, $0.01 penny or so. However, if you bid on large, barely related targets, this will eventually jump up. If you use landing pages/banners to presell the offer. You need a good CTR from LP to offer to make it work. If you bid a penny per impression and you only get 10 clicks on your landing page, then means you’re paying $1 per click to the offer page. This is much more expensive that other places. So keep this in mind. You need to test landing pages and get good CTR.

However, for newbies, this is the best thing ever. You don’t need to make landing pages, you can direct link and make tons of money with it. You don’t need to make ads, you don’ need to worry about quality score. And there are only a few testing variables: 1. target (site); 2. Offer. That’s it. Match those 2 and you’re profitable.

Good luck with your journey into PPV world. It might be your best traffic source.