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How to get new customers with pay-per-view (PPV) marketing
Pay-per-view PPV Marketing

Imagine if you could hand-pick competitor’s sites and then have your landing page/ad open up right in front of the visitors’ eyes when they went to any of those web sites.

Talking about pipping someone at the finish line!

This is just one of the advantages that pay-per-view (PPV) marketing has over pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

In fact, there are a number of reasons why PPV marketing might be your cup of tea:

You can target precisely, even to the point of singling out specific web sites to target eg. If you were marketing insurance, you could display your ad in front of geico.com
It’s relatively cheap – pay-per-view bids are often far cheaper than pay-per-click bids
You can reach millions of people that you may not get in front of otherwise
This target audience has specifically opted-in so they are more receptive to the offers
There’s no such thing as a Quality Score rating
And for affiliate marketers, there is nothing to prevent you direct linking to a merchant’s landing page if you wish
You can reach different target audiences beyond Google and other search engines

Now, I’m not saying that PPV marketing takes the place of PPC marketing – not at all.

While I love PPC marketing as a means to target potential customers in volume – it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. No search engine is.

There are other advertising networks out there, with other customers whom I’m not going to reach through Google AdWords, however high my Quality Score and bid prices are.

This article is for those of you who want to place their eggs in more than one basket, and perhaps save some money in the process. Let me introduce you to PPV marketing…

What is Pay-per-view Marketing?

PPV marketing expands your reach into PPV networks that have target audiences in the millions, all of whom have agreed to be shown ads in context with what they’re looking for.

However, it works quite differently to search engine marketing, where the audience is comprised of searchers and web surfers.

A PPV network is comprised of advertisers and target audience, with the PPV network then giving advertisers a means to connect with their target audience.

How it works is that a person downloads software from a provider in exchange for freebies, eg. games, toolbars, screensavers, shopping tools, emoticons, ecards.

This is more commonly known as Adware, but not to be confused with Spyware, which doesn’t have the user’s consent and is usually nefarious or even harmful to the person’s computer.

Adware is not harmful and it’s permission-based, so users ‘opt-in’ so to speak. Because they’re aware of being presented ads, it’s not as intrusive as advertising to someone without invitation.

Also, because the ads are targeted contextually, they usually appear when the person is on a related site or looking for related keywords. It’s a “if you like this, you might like this….” concept of advertising.

Once a person downloads the Adware, they are then part of the PPV networks target audience, and potentially yours.

Who should try PPV Marketing?

I mentioned affiliate marketers just before, however PPV marketing can be used by both affiliate marketers and direct marketers.

PPV marketing is not always suitable for all products and services, although finding out usually requires some testing on one or more networks.

If you’ve got an offer that can be piggy-backed onto another relevant site, again along the lines of “if you like that, then you may like this”, then PPV marketing could be worth a trial.

What type of targeting can you do with Pay-per-view Campaigns

There are usually four different ways you can target an audience (depending on the PPV network):

Keywords – specify the keywords relevant to your offer, and what the user may be searching for
URLs – list the URLs of sites that you want your ad to appear in front of
Categories – specify the category of site that your product may be relevant to, eg. Shopping
Run of the network (RON) – very broad approach that markets to the whole network (not usually recommended)

For the uninitiated, I’d recommend starting with URL targeting, then once you’re proficient, expand onto keyword-targeting and maybe category-targeting, depending on your offer.

URL-targeting is one of the most exciting capabilities with PPV marketing. Here’s a scenario of what you can do:

Let’s say you’re marketing travel insurance – you could:

Compile a list of keywords relevant to travel insurance and people looking to travel – create a keyword-targeted campaign for anyone searching on those keywords or visiting contextually relevant sites
Create a broader category-targeted campaign based on Travel and Accommodation
Compile a list of URLs, then create a URL-targeted campaign
These URLs could be competitors’ sites or similar sites to your offer eg. travel insurance sites. They could also be sites where people would go that would be interested in what you have to offer, eg. people making travel bookings may be interested in travel insurance
By choosing the top ranked free and paid listings on Google, these are likely to be sites that are highly trafficked, highly relevant and successful
When any of those travel web sites are visited by someone who’s joined to the PPV network, your ad or landing page appears in front of them
Eg. a traveller visits www.insuremytrip.com or www.tripology.com and is also presented with the option of your web site
Conversion rates can be higher with URL-targeted campaigns because you are offering them another product that is directly relevant and helpful to what they’re looking for
NB: Porting PPC campaigns from your search engine accounts is not recommended. Treat PPV marketing as a different beast, with different research, ads, campaign set-up, reporting and tactics required.

How do you sign up as a PPV Marketer?

PPV Networks are very similar to PPC networks, although usually there’s less to fill out.

You can sign-up by going to the home page of the network, then clicking on the registration link. You’ll then be able to fill in your business details, billing details, initial deposit if required and occasionally provide proof of identity.

With many networks, you can be signed up and good to go within a matter of minutes.

Our Pay-Per-View Network Partner

LOOKHU

Lookhu puts on some of the coolest live PPV events on the planet. From influencer boxing matches to battle rap competitions and everything in between, we deliver the excitement fans want. Lookhu offers Bi-Weekly 70% revenue split payouts to creators. Lookhu pays out a 5% referral fee for promoters of its PPV events as well.

Pay-per-view Ads

Each of these networks offers a variety of different ads, ranging from text, banners, toolbars to simply opening your landing page directly in front of the viewer.

Pop-ups – these aren’t the usual garden-variety pop-ups. A new browser window is actually opened on top of the web site, usually contextually based when a match is made between the user’s browsing location and your targeted keyword, category or URL. Pop up blockers don’t stop these due to the technology used.

Pop-unders – while they sound similar to pop-ups, pop-unders appear in your bottom tab where the “Start” button is, so it appears like a minimized window. A person might bring it up straight away or later on.

Banner Ads – size may vary for display ads across networks.
Full Page Ads – this could be an ad or your landing page opening in front of them.
Text Link Ads – these are simply text ads that link to your landing page.
Custom Sliders – These are like pop-ups, but they slide in from a particular area on the page. The user can then click on it or if they don’t, it disappears are 30 seconds or so.
Toolbar ads – custom toolbar ads.

Mobile Ads – ads specifically for mobile devices with full html browser capabilities.
Inline Ads – these are hyperlinked keywords within the text, that then open to an ad.
This adds a new element to split-testing, because not only will you be testing different ad copy, you’ll be monitoring which types of ads perform the best for you on each PPV network.

Tracking, Testing & Optimizing PPV Campaigns

Each PPV network and campaign should be tested on its own merits.

PPV Networks have their own reporting, which can vary in quality. For any marketing, it’s great to have an independent report that gives you the conversions vs spend, so you can measure ROI properly.

Ideally, you also want to see which ads and landing pages are performing the best, so you can improve your PPV campaigns. Similar to PPC, you want to keep increasing views, click through rates and conversions.

Pay-per-view networks do allow you to insert tracking tokens in your destination URLs, so if you’re already using another tracking tool, it’s usually easy to integrate.

Different PPV networks will perform better or worse for different offers that you promote. Eg. some offers perform well on Lead Impact, but the same offer loses money on Media Traffic.

Success or failure on one network, doesn’t mean you’ll get the same result on another network. Each network has different software installed by different users and new people for you to market to. However, please test each network on its own merits.

To optimize your PPV campaigns means adjusting your targeting. For example, you could:

Try another demographic
Try a different network
Change your frequency capping
Cull the targets (either keywords or URLs) that don’t work and more aggressively promoting those that do. If you see URLs that are getting loads of traffic but not converting then get rid of them.
Use a different landing page – Direct linking the landing page or dedicated landing page (depending on what was tested)

Similar to Google’s Content Network, you can take the most successful URL/s, create a dedicated campaign for that URL, then create ads and landing pages targeted for that site, to increase your conversions yet again.

Pay-per-view Marketing with SpeedPPC

Because many PPV networks offer a bulk upload tool, you can use SpeedPPC to smoothly and quickly upload your pay per view campaigns.

SpeedPPC has a list of established PPV campaigns that you can target, and if you come across any more that aren’t listed, you can easily create a custom output to suit that particular network as well.

PPV marketing is new to SpeedPPC version 4.5, so SpeedPPC members should check out the Members Area for the tutorial video on how to create four PPV campaigns simultaneously and save even more time!

PPV Marketing Summed Up.

If you’re already familiar with PPC networks, you’ll adapt to PPV marketing very easily.

Pay-per-view networks can be a very exciting and profitable medium to market through. Just remember that each network is very different, and more so than different search engines.

Test carefully and measure your profits, comparing different networks (audiences), different ads and different landing pages to find the sweet spot for your offer.