PPV continues to be one of the most lucrative traffic sources in affiliate marketing. Although a lot goes into running a successful campaign, that extra work can translate to higher earnings.

We wanted to provide you with some guidelines that will improve your chances of earning money with PPV when used to promote CPA offers at MaxBounty.

Selecting Offers for PPV Campaigns

Since contextual pop-ups are deemed intrusive by many users, selecting the right campaigns is important in garnering any initial interest. It’s crucial to start off strong by choosing an offer that can convert with PPV traffic.

1. Brand Recognition

Choosing offers from brands that users will recognize will help create immediate trust between the user and the offer. This improves the chances of them engaging with your “pop”. Booking.com and McAfee are two examples of offers at MaxBounty that make a lot of money for affiliates who promote with PPV traffic. This is partly because they’re brands that most users recognize.

2. Don’t Demand Too Much from the User

If you decide to promote an offer from a lesser known brand, try focusing on one where there’s minimal effort required from the user to generate a lead, like an SOI (Single Opt-In). This will ensure they don’t feel overwhelmed of what’s required of them and should result in a higher conversion rate.

These ‘easier’ actions will likely have smaller CPA rates, but earnings can add up quickly if you’re able to obtain a high volume of traffic.

3. Use Your Affiliate Manager

Use the resources at your disposal – your MaxBounty Affiliate Manager is one of them. Getting their opinion when you’re choosing a campaign to direct PPV traffic to is a great way to gain insight into what may or may not work.

Remember that your Affiliate Manager likely has experience working with hundreds or thousands of affiliates, many of them who have used PPV as a traffic source. They’ve developed an understanding of what types of offers are more likely to convert and they’ll be more than happy to share that knowledge with you.

This is often an underutilized asset in affiliate marketing.

Choosing a PPV Network

To determine which PPV network you should use to acquire traffic, ask yourself the following questions:

How experienced am I at affiliate marketing?

How experienced am I at using PPV as a traffic source?

How much money am I willing to allocate to this traffic source? 

You’ll be able to eliminate some networks from your option list based on how you answer those questions.

PPV networks that are targeted towards experienced affiliates will require higher initial deposits. This can sometimes correlate with higher quality traffic but if you’re a beginner, it’s best to work with networks that will make your budget last longer.

In addition to deposit and bid costs, networks may differ by offering their own unique features. Some may also be more effective at acquiring traffic in different parts of the world.

We’ve chosen a PPV network for three different experience levels based on their minimum deposits and functionality:

Beginner Experience Level / Minimum Deposit: $100

Direct CPV

Intermediate Experience Level / Minimum Deposit: $500

50onRed/RTXplatform

Advanced Experience Level / Minimum Deposit: $1000

PropelMedia (formerly TrafficVance)

Demographic Diligence

Thoroughly researching the demographics for your niche is where you can gain an advantage over other affiliates. It takes time, but that time can go a long way in optimizing your targeting. You want to be promoting to the right users who have significant interest in the campaigns you’ve chosen. At the same time, you’re minimizing the possibility of targeting towards those who don’t.

In general, PPV works best when you can break down niches into even more specific segments.

If you’re promoting a travel campaign like Booking.com that allows contextual traffic, don’t just target towards users who travel frequently. Instead, focus on retirees looking to explore the world, or adventurers with an athletic objective, like rock climbing.

This approach can apply to almost any campaign at MaxBounty that allows PPV traffic.

Keep on Tracking

Running PPV campaigns will require tracking, and it’s important to analyze the data frequently to determine which targets have potential, and which you should cut loose. The less time you spend on something that isn’t going to convert long term, the more time you have for optimizing something that will.

Your PPV network will not only track your conversions, but where those conversions are coming from, and what websites your campaign is ‘popping’ on. MaxBounty also has internal tracking to help you monitor the success of each specific offer you may be running.

Using a third-party tracking platform such as Prosper202, can also provide additional benefits. These essentially work as an aggregator for both MaxBounty, and your PPV network’s tracking, offering advanced measurement, metrics, and analytics for each of your PPV campaigns.

Landing Pages

After you’ve chosen an offer and a network, decide whether to use a landing page or a direct link.

Although using a landing page as part of the sales funnel can provide several benefits, beginning your promotion with one can hinder potential optimization.

Direct linking your campaigns when you first launch them gives you a better idea of what offers have potential to convert.

Creating and implementing landing pages can be time consuming, and you don’t want to spend that time working on an LP for it to have little positive impact on your campaign. There’s no point putting icing on your cake if it wasn’t baked at the right temperate to begin with. Instead, use landing pages as a tool for optimization and a method to increase conversions, rather than basing your entire strategy around them.

If your offer’s converting and you want to try using a landing page, there’s two options you can choose from:

1. If you have some fundamental design and HTML knowledge, you can make your landing pages yourself completely from scratch.
2. You can utilize any number of landing page builder services such as Instapage, Unbounce, and LanderApp.

Having the ability to make your own page allows for customization and the ability to create what you’ve visualized. However, the custom builders mentioned above are intuitive enough to be considered great alternatives.

Test and Scale Your PPV Campaigns

Finally, you want to discover what’s converting and expand on it. This involves continuous experimentation of all elements involved in setting up a campaign. Split-testing landing pages is a crucial part of this.

What to alter and test:

• Headlines
• Images
• Call-to-action copy
• Buttons
• Concise VS informative presentation

Adjusting these components on multiple landing pages is the best way to figure out what works best at attracting a certain demographic for your niche. This process can go as far as you want to take it, as you can repeatedly eliminate the options that aren’t working and create slight variants of the pages that are attracting users. Continuing this duplication and alteration process is the key to landing page optimization and improving your PPV campaign conversion rate.

For ways to scale your PPV campaigns, check out our How to Scale Up Your Affiliate Marketing Campaign Today  post from earlier this month.