Promoting Penny Auction Offers

Penny Auction offers have been dominating PPV, Media Buys and even cloaked on Facebook over the past year. These offers have done a great job in keeping our internal division afloat through uncertain times. For anyone already promoting business opportunity offers, it's a must that you get into this vertical as the promotional methods and landing pages are similar. These offers have killer payouts making them a big hit among both new and old affiliates alike. When these offers work, affiliates get rich. They are about as difficult to get working as a business opportunity offers - we hope to be able to get you profitable with some advice below and some coaching from your AM.

The first thing you'll realize with Penny Auction offers when promoting them, is even with the best offer page in the world, you're going to need to build out a good landing page to make this product really work. It's important to test different types of calls to action. The most popular calls to action are available online in many places, and also there are tons of free / paid filepacks available with these. Test the best calls to action because sometimes "Continue" is not the best button to use. You can really entice the reader with a good call to action and we've seen some CTR's literally increase the conversion percentage 2-3% alone.

Experiment with different colors / calls to action - depending on the offer and the terms of sign up / purchase, these may vary: IE: "Sign up now and get 20 free bids" if they offer a free bid pack with sign up If there are any perks or benefits, focus on these in the ad copy leading up to the call to action and then capitalize. It never hurts to reinforce all the reasons why your offer is great and the user should sign up - you need to include confidence in what you're selling so that the potential customer can pick up on this and feel confident in their purchase. Explain the benefits, make the consumer only think about how great penny auction sites are.

If promoting on PPV, you need to make the page look similar to the offer page. This is pretty standard, make sure similar colors, button styles, shapes (rounded corners or whatever) call to action, etc., you just want it to flow. Consumers are very wary online these days, always on the look out for scams and whatnot so make sure it looks clean and the transition from your LP to the offer page is seamless and fluid. Internally on media buys and FB, we have been using traditional rebill landing pages that explain the benefits to the consumer and relate to them. Use emotions on your landing pages and sell it straight home to them. Below are some great exchanges that dominate with penny auctions where you can also find good examples of landing pages throughout their distribution sources:

It's not necessarily a good idea to hide that this is going to cost the user something because they're going to find out eventually that they have to enter their CC info. It's actually better to be up front about this, and instead of trying to pull a fast one on them, spend your efforts on actually selling them on the offer - explain to them all the amazing deals they can find, give specific examples of past auctions where people have gotten ridiculous up to 90% off discounts, etc. Specific examples are really key as they create a mental movie in the user's mind so you want to walk them through the experience of bidding and winning an awesome item in an auction and how amazing it felt so that they can recreate the experience in their head and this will make them want to sign up even more. So don't hide from the price, because people might be less inclined to believe an offer like this if it were actually free as this would put them on their guard - "how can such an amazing service be free?" so just let them know the price but downplay the amount and focus on what an amazing deal it is instead. Use images of products with traditional X out, javascript counters, and talk about how low of a price you can get the products for.

Not all penny auctions are created equal, it's important to split test the different offers - we will always notify you of which ones are the top performers (current top deal: Penny Auction - DealFun (US) CID 190174). I don't know how many times I've had affiliates who can't seem to get the most popular offer working yet are banking on a more obscure offer. It's also a good idea to target the other competing offer pages when running these. Be sure when you're targeting to include the other auction websites, both standard auction and pay-per-bid auction. Once you get your campaign profiting it's a must that you scale it internationally: we have offers coming for over 50 countries in the coming weeks!

The best bet here is to use our other traffic source guides and bidding guides before starting in with an unfamiliar platform. If you're starting on a platform for the first time it's best to get advice from both your AM and a representative of the traffic source. If you've had success with source like PPV in the past but recently hit a setback, it's not always wise to pick up a new source, you should first try to stick with what you know and have made money with as it will be much easier to recover than it would be to start anew and relearn the curve. For PPV, the targets you're going to want to get into are auction websites, gambling websites, new technology / discount technology websites, information websites, classified, product review and news websites. Don't be scared to hit your account manager up for some suggestions!

This guide has been archived from our network emails. EWA sends out new guides every week explaining how to run certain niches and specific traffic sources.