I’m one of those people that can’t stand PPV. I stopped doing it long before the hype came about. I think the traffic quality is a complete joke, long term sustainability is impossible because you’re advertising the same product to almost the same set of users every day, and lastly the competition is now fierce because every blogger is talking about it. If you’re a newb, don’t touch PPV, you’ll go through a decent size ad budget in literally 30 seconds, drop your ad server even faster than that, and lose a ton of money! With that said, here’s what I learned about PPV when I did it, and maybe this can help some of you that are still interested in doing it.

1) For the best results, create a landing page that looks similar to your target site to convert the user. You’ll essentially trick them into thinking your site is the site they were looking for and they’ll dish out a lot of information. It’s sort of like legal phishing. This will skyrocket conversions but also lower quality quite a bit so it’s not perfect for every product. Either way, I did have a lot of success doing this.

2) I can’t recommend rackspace.com’s cloudsites enough. I thought my servers were good until I realized I could send thousands of impressions a second to them with PPV traffic instantly dropping them and spending $100s sending traffic to a down site. With that said, I moved all my PPV landing pages to cloudsites on the cheap and haven’t been happier. In fact, I use cloudsites for most of my static landing pages now.

3) Remember the pros have automated much of PPV, which means people are using programs to auto adjust their bids to out bid you by a penny on every target. If you raise your bid, I can guarantee you any legitimate competition will be automatically raising that bid higher than yours within the next hour. If you’re running manually this is going to cause you a complete headache. With that said it usually doesn’t matter too much to be in the second or third spot providing your competition isn’t advertising the same product. I did research on this awhile back looking at the conversion statistics of a 2nd view of my product compared to a first but I can’t remember the results at the moment. I’m fairly certain first views converted much higher. If you decide to do your own research let me know what you find.

4) Cloaking is used quite a bit by the bigger PPV guys to add sound to their landing pages and beat the landing page approval process. This does increase conversions although it’s generally against any PPV network’s TOS so be careful.

5) Finding a white label offer and creating it to look like the target site is a winner.