Just so everybody knows, PPV isn’t the easiest thing in the world to master.  I recently read a thread on WickedFire that made me realize something.  If you bid on anything on TrafficVance your minimum bid is $10 CPM.  This is because the minimum bid is $0.01 x 1000 = $10.

I also tested out a number of campaigns and failed miserably and lost hundreds of dollars.  So if you’re worried about losign a few hundred testing, this is not something you should try.

What I’m giving away here was my first profitable campaign on PPV.  I’m going to let everybody know just how I did it.

First thing I did was sign up on TrafficVance.  When you first sign up you will need at least $1,000 to get started.  So if you’re not able to blow some money, don’t try out PPV.

Next, you will want to go and download Laser URL.  If you don’t know how to use this program go here for Laser URL Tutorial Videos.  You will want to search a very closely related term to your offer using Laser URL.  I always let it search 10 pages deep on all three search engines.  This gives me a number of URL’s to prune and use for testing purposes.  Once you get these URLs, export them to a spreadsheet and then I suggest researching each URL to see if they even relate to your offer.  If they relate, it’ll be one of your targets.

I ran the Mobile IQ Quiz – QuizYou over at EWA.  I used Laser URL to search for the term iq quiz.  I of course pruned my targets and threw the list into TrafficVance.

My first time through I made sure I was the highest bidder on all the URL’s I targetted because I wanted some good test data.  I let it run for a couple days and came back to optimize it.  Make sure you’re tracking where your traffic comes from using the %%$KEYWORD%% variable that TrafficVance uses.  This way you can see which targets are converting and what the EPC for that target is so you can adjust your bids according.

After some time I was able to drop all the low traffic and non-converting targets down to about 10 targets.  The only bad thing about this was that I had to monitor these things day and night because I would get into daily bidding wars on URL’s, especially my best converting URL.  This got tiresome, I finally just got fed up with it and was okay with being in the 3rd spot.  I noticed more and more competition coming in on my targets and I was eventually being out bid on all my target URL’s.  The headache to keep up with these bids eventually became so much that I quit running the offer because of the increased competition and higher bids led to a dismal ROI that was no longer worthy of my time.

I came back a couple months later and noticed all the bids were much lower than they once were so I turned the campaign on and let it run for a couple days.  For whatever reason the offer was no longer converting on these URL’s so I paused the offer and haven’t ran it since.

My gross revenue for this offer was $7,144.00 and my total spend for this campaign was $4,867.27.  That equates to a $2,277 profit and a 46.7% ROI.

P.S. – If you’re going to run a PPV campaign, I suggest that your Prosper202 install be on a dedicated server.  I always suggest LiquidWeb for any server you may need.

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1 and Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 2.

After having 2 sets of images have their CTR die out on me I got lazy and tested out another another ad copy and saw my conversions tank by 54% so I figure the ad copy had to be misleading.   So I decided I wanted to try out 5 completely different sets of ad copy and see the difference between their conversion rates.  I tried to relate each ad title with the description.  I used the same images as my first go around so I know they can perform decently and since I haven’t ran them in awhile their CTR should at least be respectable now.

Here are the stats for the last 7 days according to Prosper.

• Ad Copy 1 (Original): 8280 Clicks, 438 Conversions, 5.29% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 2: 12612 Clicks, 498 Conversions, 3.95% Conversation Ratio
• Ad Copy 3: 441 Clicks, 9 Conversions, 2.04% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 4: 323 Clicks, 10 Conversions, 3.1% Conversion Ratio
• Ad Copy 5: 721 Clicks, 34 Conversions, 4.72% Conversion Ratio

I found it pretty crazy that my original ad copy converted best for me after the split testing I did.

So here’s concrete proof that split testing makes a huge difference!  If you’ve never split tested your ad copy, DO IT NOW! I’ve never done much split testing of ad copy until I ran this campaign and have finally came to an amazing revelation, even though I should’ve known it.

On Facebook your CTR depends on the image you use in your ad copy.  Your conversion ratio depends on the text in your ad copy!  It is imperative to split test both!

This is a follow-up to Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.

Okay so the CTR began to die out on the images I found in Split Testing on Facebook Case Study: Part 1.  I was still making some pretty good money off this campaign and decided I needed to switch up the ad copy.  Me being pretty lazy I went to the merchant’s landing page and used some of the lines that caught my attention in my ad copy and mind you since I was lazy I only used one variation and scaled this out to every demographic.  After about 5 days of continually submitting ads I finally got my ads past the review team at Facebook.  I just knew I was going to kill it again for a few days and wasn’t sure what I was going to do after that, probably try a different ad copy.

So I threw up this one ad copy using those images I used in the first go round.  I figure they haven’t been shown in a couple weeks, they should have some juice left in them.  Plus with some new ad copy I should be sitting pretty.

I ran it for a couple days and lost a nice chunk of change, mainly because my conversion ratio had tanked by 54%.  I’ve included screenshots below.  And that amount of data was more than enough to be statistically relevant.  My first concern was since I haven’t ran this offer in a few days maybe the advertiser was up to no good so I hit up my affiliate manager and asked him if the conversion rate for the network as a whole changed and he said nope.  So I was thinking since the only thing that had changed was the ad copy, maybe the ad copy was now a bit misleading because it did include that the user could win money.

Part 3 I will be split testing 5 different sets of ad copy to determine how it affects my conversion ratio.

So here I was dominating this niche on Facebook so I scaled it out to different demographics and was doing great with this offer.  I was effing pumped and got kinda lazy for a few days and I knew my CTR would die out eventually.  I thought no problem, I’ll find some more images that are similar to the ones I’m using now and just make a few more ads and keep banking on this offer.

I finally figured out something I could search for that would bring up similar images on Google image search and I found a couple I thought were going to kill it so I saved them.  I was talking to a friend about needing some more images and he told me to use Bing’s image search.  I checked it out and oh my god!  Bing’s image search is killer!  Try it out sometime if you haven’t already.

So I found 88 images I thought might work well and I used the same exact ad copy.  The only thing I did was change the picture.  I knew to be profitable in this particular demographic for this offer I would need a 0.10% CTR or higher with the amount I was bidding, so that’s what I was looking for.  If you’ll look at the screenshots below you’ll see I found a handful of keepers.

On the next part of this case study I’ll switch up the ad copy and see how well the ads perform.