For most Pay-Per-View marketers, bidding on targets is a very complicated and actually rather confusing process.  We often hear such kind of questions and complains:  I am the top bidder on a keyword, but why am I not receiving any traffic?  Someone is bidding $2 on a url, how can he make a profit of it?  Well, there are a lot of tricks and cautions about bidding.  Here are some.

Be aware of fake bids!

In order to push the competitors out of market, some people play fake bids.  That’s why you see some unreasonably high bids in Leadimpact and Trafficvance.  Don’t they get burned up with such a high bid?  No, it actually costs them nothing.  I’m now giving you an example of how they do it.  Let’s say I am targeting a domain name of “loan.com”.  To scare away my competitors, I set up a campaign with “loan.com” as the target.  I use the day parting approach to remove every day except one and then to remove every hour except one.  So say today is Monday I would set the campaign to run on Sunday at 5am and bid $2.00 on it.  Then the following Sunday I would change it to Saturday.  This $2.00 bid will show as the highest bid for every day of the week.  All the newbies will be either scared away or trying to outbid it and lose their money.  By doing this my fake campaign actually never gets any traffic and suffers no cost at all, but it kills off all the competitors.  In the mean time I am bidding in second or third place with a bid of $0.025 and soaking up all the traffic.  So watch out for fake bids.  If you see a bid list like $0.98, $0.94, $0.58, $0.06, $0.05, $0.049…, the first three bids are fake.  You should bid at $0.061 – just above the bid that appears to be real.

How can the # 1 bidder not receiving any traffic?

There are at least two scenarios that can cause this situation.  Firstly, if one keyword has 10 people all bid at $0.015, then everyone is listed as #1 bidder but you only get one tenth of the traffic.  Then how to make sure that you are the only top bidder?  Increase your bid slightly to see if anyone spins out behind you.  Secondly, bids for the same keyword are actually separated for different categories.  You won’t see other people’s bids for the same keyword but from a different category.  This problem happens when you are in category A with a bid of $0.015 and you are showing at the #1 position.  But someone else is in category B where the minimum bid starts at $0.025.  In this case, he will be getting most of the traffic – even without your awareness.  In other words, someone who is use the same keyword but in another category is beating you.  Because of different categories you won’t see such kind of competition.  So you might think your target is crappy and throw it away.  Actually it’s not.  The correct practice should be increasing your bid gradually to see if it starts generating traffic even though you are ranked as #1.

Use target variations to low your bidding cost

You always have competition on those targets that convert.  Strong competition will eventually make these targets no longer profitable.  One way around this is to use the variations of these targets.  If someone is bidding you out of profit, you should pause the keyword or just set it at break-even point, and then you go get traffic on the domain variations.  In PPV campaigns that have bidding wars on domains, 99% of the time people are only bidding the main domain without variation.

You should bid for profit not for top spot

When you start a new campaign, you should always set your targets at minimum bids for 24 hours to see where the traffic is, and then you can step up gradually.  For each step you should increase your bid only by one cent and then monitor for 24 hours to see if traffic increases.  You need to wait for 24 hours each time because it can take a few hours for the new bid to filter through the PPV system.  If still no traffic, repeat the process until traffic kicks in and then evaluate the quality.  In many cases keywords are not profitable at top bid, but instead are profitable at minimum or intermediate bid.  So you just sit on these low bids and pick up the loose ends of the traffic.  Always remember that you are bidding for profit, not for the top position.  One final suggestion: never use auto-bid functions provided by PPV networks.  It may save you time but will cost you quite a big fortune.

Bidding can be quite different games for different PPV networks

Trafficvance, Leadimpact and Media Traffic are three major PPV networks. The bidding strategies for each of them can be quite different.  As a rule of thumb, you should refuse to bid more than $0.90 for any keyword in Leadimpact.  Nothing can be that profitable to bid that high.  Trafficvance is a different animal, and some of your bids can be up to $2.00 on there.  For Media Traffic, never exceed $0.05 as their traffic quality is very low.

Calculate your profit margin before you go into a bidding war

Whether or not you can win a bidding war depends on if your profit margins are higher than those of your competitors.  So the most important thing you should be focusing on is to increase your profit margins.  Higher CTR ads, better landing page, better offer, higher payout on the offer, better lead quality etc. are all important determinants for how high you will be able to bid.