The ultimate guide to PPV and PPC bidding strategy in affiliate marketing đ§âđ (2)
The ultimate guide to PPV and PPC bidding strategy in affiliate marketing đ§âđ
Hey guys,
There are many components to a successful affiliate marketing campaign. If you read various guides and tutorials you might see different comments about whatâs most important. Some might say itâs the offer everything depends on, while others will say itâs the landing page that can make or break your campaign.
Either way, one thing you need regardless of all the other variables is a bidding strategy. No matter how well you prepare and research your campaigns, if you donât set the correct bids youâll crush the potential of your campaign. đŽđ¤Ś
Read on and find out how to design a flawless bidding strategy that will take your PPC and PPV campaigns to the next level. đĽđ
â How to prepare a bidding strategy?
Before you decide on the bids you need to consider all the variables that dictate the bid amount. Since youâre here for the bidding strategy, weâre assuming youâre familiar with the basics of affiliate marketing. We also hope youâre armed with the best affiliate marketing tools and that youâre determined to make that campaign work.
Now, onto the first step.
đ Choose a niche
The higher the bid the higher the quality of traffic youâll receive. This sentence is bound to be repeated frequently throughout this article because it really is the premise of effective affiliate marketing. If you choose a demanding niche such as casino, gambling, or nutra, youâll get significantly better results with higher quality traffic.
This is exactly why you tend to see such serious offers advertised with native traffic, social media ad campaigns, and even on Google Adwords. These are ads of the highest quality and they tend to be run by experienced affiliates who can afford that $1 cost-per-click⌠and that $20 cost-per-click as well.
đ Decide on the targeting
Leaving expensive traffic sources aside, GEO targeting is another variable that entails completely different bidding strategies. The same bid price that can buy you the highest quality in one GEO will buy you mere scraps in another.
Geo-targeting matters and you need to familiarize yourself with different tiers of traffic as well. While itâs usually the offers and creatives that need to be adjusted for a particular audience, budget and therefore bids will always be affected by the affluence of the targeted audience.
đ Plan campaign strategy
Yes, thereâs a lot of strategizing before executing a perfect PPC/PPV campaign. But thatâs usually not enough either, as campaign behavior is often so unpredictable that youâll need at least two backup plans. And thatâs what we need to discuss.
Before you set your eyes on the prize you need to decide whether you want to test quickly by setting big budgets, no limits, and high bids? Or maybe you just want to dip your toes and give an untested offer a try by setting minimum bids and testing a small bit of traffic. Make a note of what your testing phase will look like and on what conditions you are going to increase your ad spend.
đ Determine your budget
The key to successful advertising is the budget. Yes, usually itâs a big budget that can ensure your success. However, the most important thing is to calculate a budget based on your offers, targeting, the number of landing pages/ads, and all the other smaller components.
You wonât make money with affiliate marketing if youâre not careful with your budget. Sometimes it can be easily counted how much you should spend on each part of your advertising campaign⌠but sometimes itâs just a gamble. If you pour more money into one source, youâll either end up with a goldmine, or youâll spend it all just to find out that this source clearly doesnât perform well for your offer.
Either way â research how much money you need to make your PPC/PPV campaigns work and plan accordingly.
đ Talk to the affiliate program/network account manager
They are here to help you. They also have vast experience and knowledge about the platform. Whether itâs a traffic source account manager or affiliate program support person, you can and you should ask them questions.
Problems with the affiliate link? URLs not looking perfect? Need tips on optimizing? Or maybe a fairly specific whitelist for a keyword campaign? Affiliate account managers are there to help you. They know a lot of details and technicalities. Quite often they might even know what kind of landing page works best for a given offer. They are simply your shortcut to success.
đ Prepare creatives
Before you prepare a bidding strategy you need to think about how many creatives youâre planning to use for one advertising campaign. Youâll need to count your ads, landers, and other variables to know where to allocate your budget. Youâll also need some backup ideas in case one of your ads has a disastrously low CTR.
Although the amount of creatives affects your budget more than bids, you never want to launch a campaign unprepared. And you never want to keep an underperforming lander running just because you have no other options.
đ Learn about the bidding mechanism
Now onto the more technical part. Each traffic source has a different kind of bidding mechanism in place. While for the most part, they are very similar â you pick a bid and it wins you traffic. However, in detail, the inner workings of bidding algorithms are different between networks.
In Zeropark, the campaign bid will work towards averaging the cost of bids, so if there are sources within a campaign that are cheaper the algorithm will pay less for them but because of that, it will be able to pay more for sources that are more expensive.
The average bid is also shaped by the custom bids set within the campaign.
In general, if you set the campaign bid in Zeropark, the algorithm will try to get you all kinds of placements, some cheaper and some more expensive than the bid price youâve specified. This is beneficial when youâre in the test phase because you get to try placements from outside your bid range and that lets you gain an insight into the earning potential of a source.
Remember thatâs how the Zeropark bidding algorithms work. This is not the case with many other ad networks. Some might use a similar algorithm under the name SmartCPM while others might only operate with flat bids where youâll always pay exactly the same amount of money for placement, and you will only get access to placements with that exact price.
âď¸ Whatâs the difference between pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-view (PPV) bidding strategies?
Pop or domain (PPV) traffic and push (PPC) have a different nature. In PPV, you pay per view, so your ad (be it banner ads, some form of display ads, or a full-screen popup) costs you money regardless of whether someone clicks on it or ignores it completely. Volumes for pop ads are usually huge and thereâs no guarantee that all your ads will be clicked on. Thatâs why the clicks are cheap and low bids can be effective in certain GEOs.
In PPC advertising, which is limited solely to push traffic, you donât pay for each time your ad shows up as a push notification on someoneâs desktop or mobile device. You only pay for those times when people actually click on the notification. PPC campaigns tend to be slightly more expensive but they also have a slightly higher success rate.
PPC campaigns have one more characteristic trait. Since you only pay for notification clicks, there are sometimes clicks and conversions that come late. Your ad can be sent out in the morning but a busy user will only notice it in the evening. They will like the ad so theyâll click on it and end up converting. If youâve run out of your funds early afternoon, you might end up with a negative traffic source balance.
And an unexpected commission.
â ď¸ If you want to learn:
- How to bid effectively?
- What budgets to set?
- What bidding mistakes to avoid?
Magda
Hey Magda, thanks for another good post but I´d like to add some thoughts again 
Personally I definitely prefer PPC over PPV bids to have better control and also that I only pay for clicks.
But there´s another factor that annoys me alot with CPM campaigns:
It´s more complicated to track them properly.
On PPC I can just set the CPC and the tracker know how much I paid for the click.
A tracker however can only see and track the traffic that arrives the tracker and that´s the problem with CPM campaigns.
Scenario 1: I receive 1000 impressions in the trafficsource at $1 CPM with a CTR of 1% = 10 clicks that arrive the tracker at $0.10 CPC
Scenario 2: I receive 100k impressions in the trafficsource at $1 CPM with a CTR of 0.01% = 10 clicks that arrive at the tracker at $10 CPC
Same bid at the trafficsource and same tracker stats for amount of clicks but completely different performance.
The tracker can only work with the data you feed it and for this CPC is much better, at least for me.
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