Steezy's PPV contest follow along campaign (24)
Offer: iPad2 email subs
Traffic source: PPV - Lead impact
Budget : $200
Tracking: 202
Network: WSM, may split in another if the CRs aren't hot.
Methods: I'm going to make LPs around specific topics or trends. I'll try a couple different setups based on some of the guides here.
TOOLS: My noggin, affexpert for all the cool affexpert stuff and for my LPs I'll be using GIMP for graphics, tweaking some templates and/or using good 'ole HTML.
I'm really excited about this contest. It fits in perfect with the ~2 weeks I have left on leave and my goal to get a profitable PPV campaign in that timeframe.
I've come much closer recently with two different campaigns (with two different angles altogether), one camp had a nice CTR but a shitty CR and the other had a shitty CTR but a nice CR. I need to find the hot spot between the two and make 'close' a word of the past.
update from yesterday afternoon/last night: I spent a few hours doing my homework, researching topics and potential subjects to hit. I put together a nice list last night of my subjects and potential angles. That list will become a handful of landing pages, .txt files of scraped urls and campaigns.
Since I'm dealing with targets that probably wont be bursting with volume I want to do things in batches so I don't feel like I spent a whole day on .30 worth of traffic. I also have a HUGE problem bouncing from one thing to the next in an erratic fashion so having a massive list of KW to start with will help me wrap a more professional approach around the entire project.
Great follong along steezy, good luck to you 
thanks, good luck to you as well
Honed in on 4 of my ideas today and went the yard with each of them. Scraped a fat stack of urls, put together 4 LPs and submitted to LI.
My account is loaded up and these will start tomorrow with a small budget each whenever they get approved. I'll keep an eye on the CTR/CR for each of the camps I submitted today and move forward with some of the other brainstorms I put down.
I think I heard about it here, but just in case (or maybe a duplicate for anyone that hasn't seen it) this button generator (http://jirox.net/AsButtonGen/) made the job a bit easier. I normally make my own in GIMP, but damn if these don't look sweet and save me the effort. Nobody wants to reinvent the wheel.
so for now competition stats are still goose eggs all around, but that will change soon for better or worse.
On the head games side, I'm trying to make sure I'm not as impulsive as usual with these campaigns. I saw a cool quote today from Abraham Lincoln on Lifehacker: "If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I'd spent the first four sharpening the axe". With that in mind, I'm trying to make sure I "sharpen my axe" enough before I make moves.
Haha I like that quote but I'm not sure it applies to AM. You can't really knowingly "sharpen your axe". A lot of decisions that are made before a campaign is live are assumptions. Your axe will get sharper once thy testeth.
I understand what you're saying and that's sorta what I meant, really. Knowing that the 'just do it' mentality prevails I sometimes just throw shit up just to do it without thinking it through enough. Then I don't continually sharpen it...it's either win/lose. I know for a fact not testing enough after a campaign is initially done has made me miss out on some chedda.
my landing pages got approved early this afternoon so I don't have an official numbers update, but I have some preliminary stats and observations
-I goofed by not looking through my list of scraped urls thoroughly. I was bidding on amazon.com for one lander and walmart.com on another campaign. Ate up the $5 budget for those pretty quickly and fucked the CTR for those landers.
-Beyond those SNAFUs, the urls I've got are pretty low volume. I anticipated they would be slower moving, but not THIS slow. I'll need to get creative and add some higher volume targets.
- There are a few high volume urls I've stumbled upon in the past that I may make some more specific lps for.
- My CR right now is 10%. I need to tweak my landers some to #1 make the offer a bigger deal (thanks to Mr Green for the tip from another thread) #2 test directing the flow for the visitor if they want to get the prize.
Haha you are the second one that got snagged by amazon.com!
Big ass update with stats and next steps:
Landing Page 1
Impressions: 334
Clicks: 9
CTR: 3.33%
Conversions: 0
CR: 0%
Spend: $5.01
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$5.01
Comments: This was the lander that was bidding on amazon.com. I cut that one so we'll see how it performs today.
Landing Page 2
Impressions: 292
Clicks: 3
CTR: 1.20%
Conversions: 0
CR: 0%
Spend: $4.38
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$4.38
Comments: I had one url sucking up most of the impressions for this one. That url wasn't getting clicks so I cut it. I will probably revisit that url with it's own customized lander.
Landing Page 3
Impressions: 104
Clicks: 5
CTR: 6.94%
Conversions: 2
CR (after CT): 40%
Spend: $1.56
Revenue: $4
P/L: $2.44
Comments: PROFIT! Small, but nice to see. This is the first profitable PPV camp I've seen. This one isn't pushing much volume, so I'm going to experiment a bit based on the converting urls and see what I can do.
Landing Page 4
Impressions: 71
Clicks: 1
CTR: 1.79%
Conversions: 0
CR (after CT): 0%
Spend: $1.07
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$1.07
Comments: Not a whole lot to say here except I need to get something with more volume on this one.
Overall Stats:
Spend:$12.02 ($187.98 remaining budget)
Revenue: $4.00
P/L: -$8.02
The way I see it, I have 2 main problems here. My CTR and hitting targets with enough volume to make any money.
I did a few things last night to work on my CTR:
- Reworked all my landers to make them fit into the LI pop better. I had shit hanging out all over the place before. I was basing it on the 800x600 stat on their site...not the actual size of the pop.
- I had all these hosted on my tracking domain that has the works 'tracking' in the domain. I bought a cheap, generic .info domain and moved everything over to that. I'm not sure if it will make a difference at all, but it makes me feel better. I got to thinking about someone getting freaked out over the url thinking they were being 'tracked' or something and figured it wouldn't hurt and I don't really want to play 'what if' with it.
-Added some social proof to the landers. I'm doing the same 'vote' style as most of the other people in this contest so I put how many votes there were today. I may add a facebook 'likes' thing to the landers as well. I don't want them to get too crowded though
Next steps:
- Tweak some graphics to give the ipad more or a 'WOW' factor
- Look into some higher volume, demographically (is that a word?) appropriate urls to add...(ex: try targeting some fashion sites for a celeb quiz)
- Test out site-specific lander for some of the higher volume urls I came across
- Hope changes above give me wicked hot CTRs
- I also NEED to get some kind of FTP client hooked up b/c saving and uploading all this shit to cpanel 4 times for every change is getting OLD.
Awesome right up dude, you definitely need to get those CTRs but I also wouldn't cut the fat yet since you don't have many views to get each lander a fair chance.
Good to see you are getting leads anyway!
Landing Page 1
Impressions: 334
Clicks: 5
CTR: 1.87%
Conversions: 0
CR: 0%
Spend: $5.01
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$5.01
Comments: Fucking aol.com.
Landing Page 2
Impressions: 309
Clicks: 8
CTR: 2.59%
Conversions: 0
CR: 0%
Spend: $5.64
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$5.64
Comments: From the days past I was able to cull a couple urls
Landing Page 3
Impressions: 252
Clicks: 9
CTR: 3.57%
Conversions: 1
CR (after CT): 11%
Spend: $3.78
Revenue: $2
P/L: -$1.78
Comments: added a couple urls to this one.
Landing Page 4
Impressions: 262
Clicks: 12
CTR: 4.58%
Conversions: 0
CR (after CT): 0%
Spend: $5.01
Revenue: $0
P/L: -$5.01
Comments: I didn't have any one url sucking up the juice on this lander so I added a couple more urls to the list and give it some more $
Overall Stats to date:
Spend:$32.74 ($167.26 remaining budget)
Revenue: $6.00
P/L: -$26.74
- CTR is still a nasty ho.
- missing these high volume generic URLs has fucked me for a couple days now.
- Overall CR for people hitting the offer is shit also. 2.8%
Your lander is not giving you a chance.
Lets say it costs .015 view it will cost you $15 for 1000 views.
In order to break even you need to make 10 conversions ($1.50 CPA).
If you head for around a 15% CR rate you will need 65 clicks to the offer page.
That means you need a landing page CTR of 6.5% just to break even. Work on getting that up first and foremost.
I tried something a little different. Since I had thousands of urls on each campaign I stopped all but the ones that had a good CTR or were profitable. For some reason they went to shit as well. Maybe because it was a Monday or something...I don't know. Same urls that were kicking it (albeit a bit slowly) late last week and this weekend suck ass now.
I know my landers need better CTR and I thought this may be a way to boost it without adding any more stuff.
Here are some things I HAVEN'T done to these landers:
-Audio (my next step, but could this really boost my CTR 10%+?)
-Geo
-countdown timer
-popups (the ones described here by bbrock)
Here's an example of one of my landers (the main image is an animated gif, the red border flashes), there's already a ton of shit on there given the space that I'm dealing with. I will add a countdown script to the text above the image and some audio (probably just a ding, or prize bell or clock ticking down) and see how it goes from there. Any other thoughts?
I'm still waiting on my campaign approval, so I don't have any PPV experience yet, but taking from my experience running polls on adwords and adcenter, I always saw a big difference in ad CTR and LP CTR when I had a question that was really polarizing. I'll say I'm not a Lebron fan personally, in fact, I'd vote No Way! based on my personal feeling of him (despite the fact that he really just might). That being said, the question doesn't hit me hard. You could try changing that up maybe (something like "Will Lebron always be a Loser?" or "Will King James Lead Miami to 5 Straight Rings?" I'm just thinking in terms of hitting either side hard. You want people to want to set the record straight, and sway the voting to agree with their viewpoint.
Again, I understand with PPV LPs audio, social proof, flashy thingies, etc. can help a lot with CTR. When I ran simple polls I never really did any of that, and obviously on the PPC text ads, you have text and that's it. But my LPs typically had some extreme-ish images as well. I did a Tea-Party poll once and the image showed a bunch of picketing crazy-emotional people dramatically out-performed the ones with a standard demonstration image and a Sara Palin image.
Maybe rough up/pimp the no-way image to show a dejected, ,maybe bruised/bloody Lebron? Not sure how that would work in this case, just taking a note from the Facebook thread from Stackman. Also for the Championship image, maybe one with Lebron kissing the trophy or something (obviously needs to be photoshopped or whatever).
That's really all I can comment on as again, I haven't even had my campaign live yet, but still my .02. Work on hitting the viewer's emotions hard.
You're 100% right. They do seem to have an 'ehhh...meh' feel to them. I am going to redo these and try to evoke some more passionate response. Thanks
Originally Posted by sith005
I haven't given up yet...been working on my angles. Got a new campaign submitted that I'm hoping people will be more passionate about. Also, saw a dirty dirty scheme on facebook that gave me some ideas for email subs. 
I realized that all the new campaigns I submit til the end of the contest will be submitted on the weekend...so we'll see what happens. I may be able to work something into a campaign I have going already, put in a redirect and use those KW...we'll see. I need to finish strong
no approvals on the camps I submitted Friday and I suspect I wont get any tomorrow either...going to get into my existing deactivated campaigns and get creative to get some action before the end of the day tomorrow.
Got a new LP rocking with some good URLS...rocking a 27% CTR so far...not a TON of volume, but it's a start. I dropped my old boring LP ideas and went with something that presented a challenge and would be more likely to get people's attention.
no conversions yet, but this offer hasn't really cconverted for shit the entire time. I may do some kidn of pop after they click tthat says 'calculating results, checking prizes'.
this thing went out with a wimper...offer got paused late sunday night. so no conversions BUT my CTR was in the high teens/low 20's steady so something was happening right. I'm going to keep the last campaign rolling with subs from different networks and trying different offers to find one that fits.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
Actually it is 66.666 clicks to offer page - What he did was took 100 /15 = 6.6666 . You can make this simple and just use 100 as example - 100 views will cost you 1.50 and 1.50 is what your CPA is . So you need 1 conv to break even . So if the offers converts at 15 % which is one in every 6.6666, that is the CTR rate you will need to break even .
Originally Posted by hd2010
Home > POP / PPV / Redirect > Follow-along Campaigns