I gotta admit I used to stick to the traditional landing page methods and while they worked good I had no idea what I was missing out on.
There are so many little things you can do to get peoples attention and increase your landers click through rate.
Background Color
One of the most basic and I feel overlooked thing is background color. I used to always stick to a white background, red header font, black bullet points and a blue call to action. I think someone put this layout in my head way back and while it’s always worked well, my thinking was not open to trying new things.
Not too long ago I met someone who asked my experience with testing background colors…I was like what? I felt pretty stupid for overlooking such a basic thing.
That day I setup rotations on a bunch of my running ppv campaigns testing 4-5 different background colors on each to see the results…I was shocked. I forget the exact numbers but I recall red being one of the best, it increased my CTR more than 5 times.
Shocking The Person
I just read a post by Finch about Shock Marketing Tactics for PPV and he has some really good points and ideas about how to get people to click through to the offer. While getting higher ctr by means of shocking people may not always increase conversions it can’t hurt to try. I’ve used shocking images on facebook for example and while my ads CTR was higher and I got cheaper clicks, the conversion rate for those ads were converting at 1/3 what the others were…so it’s a give and take situation that you can really only determine by testing.
Taking Control Of The Window
Now let me first off say I am not saying this is necessarily allowed on every ppv network but some networks will allow it. If they don’t…well let’s just say it’s not too hard to throw a few lines of code in once a page is approved…
I used to use a different code but I found one recently I like more from a landing page over at PPV Playbook Forums (it’s a great forum with a ton of PPV case study’s and tutorials).
<script type="text/javascript">
var width=850;
var height=950;
self.moveTo((screen.availwidth-width)/2,(screen.availheight-height)/2);
self.resizeTo(width,height);
</script>
You can adjust the size according to your landing page but this can help a lot if you can’t fit everything you want to0 into the standard ppv window size. It’s also nice to make it larger to suit the offer page that the user will see once they click your call to action…play around a bit and you’ll see what I mean.
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Along with your background color.
Red probably does help with PPV. I saw a video where the guys tested landing pages for like squeeze pages and stuff and your light blue you have here (robin egg blue) was their best performer. This is different as with PPV you have 2 seconds.
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Hey perfect timing.
I am just getting into PPV and I am going to test these ideas.
Thank you.
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Re: Shock Marketing Tactics for PPV
I read Finch’s article as well, and it was interesting to see your stats on getting higher CTR but lower conversions using similar tactics.
It seems apparent that the ‘shock’ has to pay off to some degree once they click thru if you want it to also result in a sale…
ie. an extreme example is an ad promising naked girls, but ending up on a teeth whitening ad. Guaranteed lots of clicks, but miffed viewers will convert even worse than generic traffic would.
So imo the best tactic is to come up with a shocking headline that’s merely a “spin” on where the click will take them. As long as the two are related (the LP and the ad), and there’s some corresponding payoff on the ad, it has a decent chance of increasing both the CTR and the conversion. Targeted eyeballs for the offer helps a lot too, of course.
As always, great post!
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Great post and some good tips. That’s crazy a background color had such a huge impact.
I think Steve made some good points too. I think if you go with shock, you need to somehow make it relevant. At least a little bit 😉
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I’ve been looking for a good window maximizer script for a while, thanks for that! Good tip on the backgrounds too.
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Great post! It’s amazing how much effect a small change can have. I am still surprised by things that I never thought would until I tested them.
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Hi Bryn, I noticed you’re in Canada too. I downloaded GameVance and Vembo but can’t see any ads when trying to get an idea of what works. I’ve tried running on a proxy and on VPN, neither worked.
Do you have any suggestions on how we can see ads when living in Canada? Thanks!
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I agree that the “shock” has to be relavent, but Bryn makes a good point that the shock also has to be relative to the placement. A shock ad placed in Facebook is much different than one placed on a business site or even a personal blog.
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What I’ve also found bryn is to use sound on your ppv landing pages, sound gets peoples attention, and having a female voice helps even better.
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
March 1st, 2010 at 3:47 pm
yup you are right, I mentioned that here a while back: http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/07/31/ppv-advertising-101-untap-the-potential-part-3-of-3/
I probably could have re-iterated it.
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Nice. I’m like you too, read too many guides about using tahoma bold red for headlines and just not doing enough testing. I would never have thought that changing background color could have made that much difference. Looks like I have to do a lot more split testing.
I read the article you linked to as well. Funny as well, but some more awesome tips. Thanks.
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Reply to my question you cunt!
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 2:52 pm
I don’t have any suggestions because I don’t know. Happy?
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Haha alright.
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so…. how would you resize if you are direct linking to an offer?
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Bryn Youngblut Reply:
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:42 pm
Simple…iFrame the offer into a domain of yours and use the re-size code in the same file as the iframe.
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Justin Dupre Reply:
May 9th, 2010 at 9:49 am
Or send them to a blank page with an delayed redirect script (of like 0.1 seconds) with the re-size code before that.
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Thx Bryn for the interesting post. And thank you very for the script.
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…”Reply to my question you c***!’… What the hell LOL. As if!
Quick loading landers also work, so it pays to have a well coded CSS based page really. PPV is one area where well coded landers do have a direct effect.
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Thanks for the insight re. the background color!
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Would be interesting to post a few links to landing pages that appears to readers as being efficient… just to compare… and imitate maybe…
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Thanks for the useful tips.
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interesting way to do it with the redirect
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