My $1.41 Fail at CPV
Today I want to share my lame pitiful attempt at working with CPV advertising. This past Friday I saw on the JonathanVolk.com blog the affiliate Friday interview with Ian Fernando. I checked out Ian’s blog and saw he had a lot of stuff on CPV/CPM advertising and so I got a chance to read up on that. It seemed like some interesting stuff! Then on monday Volk released his new marketing guide online and was able to clarify some of the questions I had about CPV so I figured I would give it a try. 
I opted for DirectCPV since they offer a small(by comparison) initial investment to start the program, which was $100. I browsed around online and found a free $50 after $100 deposit code (I forget what it is, go google it) that I applied. So now I have $150 in my account. Now I am completely not ready to launch a campaign but I figured I would throw a few bucks up just to get an idea of how the system works. I figured it might take a little while to aprove ads and what not. I submitted my first campaign at 9:00 at night and it got approved at about 4:00pm the next day. About as fast as Facebook ads 
. Good thing we are used to that now lol!
Harley...not the Motorcyle.
So anyways I wanted to share with you a story of my day of running CPV ads. For the sake of simplicity I once again chose to use a crappy offer from ShareASale for ChecksUnlimited. I did a direct product link to the Harley Davidson Checks that I referenced with my Andy Rodriguez post. Now I didn’t expect tto make any money of course, and actually I was expecting extremely low traffic. Instead I accumulated about 100 views costing about $.015 per view. This was all good and fine, a few bucks worth of clicks, not a big deal. However when I looked on my ShareASale tracking page I could see where one of my pages came from and was a little shocked!
There in my linking page I see the website: http://www.realitykings.com/money-talks/taxi_cab_cumfessions/picture_00.htm?id=boobdex , which is obviously a porn website. I am absolutely dying laughing at my stupidity here. I was bidding on the key phrases, ‘Harley’ ‘Harley Davidson’, etc. Of course this porn star’s name is HARLEY!! So naturally the CPV got popped up from it! So here I am, 100 clicks, probably from all porn websites. NOW THAT IS TARGETED TRAFFIC!
So if you read up on blogs like Volk’s or Fernando’s you can catch some tidbits of advice that specifically say ‘Don’t Use Keywords in CPV!’ They recommend using domain targeting, so you already know for example that someone visiting HarleyDavidson.com probably might be interested in Harley gear, as opposed to someone maybe searching ‘How Do I Sell my Harley?’ or in my case ‘Videos of Harley from Cab Confessions’!
Lesson learned everyone, good thing this one only cost me $1.41!!
3 Responses to “My $1.41 Fail at CPV”
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Last updated 6/23/2010
Nice case study, Mike.
Each PPV network performs very differently, so keeping multiple trials going is one of the ways to tame the beast.
I hope you post more, especially since you have about $148 in your account (just like me…)
LOL unlucky dude, still that’s one very memorable mistake you won’t make again:)
Have your campaigns been taking longer to get approved? I submitted my first one over a day and a half ago and it still hasn’t been approved, and I submitted to change my billing period cap from $.01 to $100 and that hasn’t been changed either.