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01/21/2015
AffPlaybook.com
AffPlaybook is a paid private forum teaching affiliates how to become successful. David Ford is the founder and owner of AffPlaybook. He is a visible member of the affiliate marketing community. The AffPlaybook forum is about 5 years old. David Ford claims to have worked in affiliate marketing for 10 years.
The issue is that much of Ford’s training focuses on teaching affiliates to maximize the use contextual adware buys. He has close associations through the forum with major contextual ad networks and CPA Networks who promote their affiliates using contextual adware. Some very visible affiliate “gurus like Andrew Wee and Ian Fernando have promoted AffPlaybook.
Originally, Ford branded his training as PPV Playbook. PPV stands for Pay Per View and became a euphemism for contextual adware several years ago when contextual adware buys became “vogue”. CPV (Cost Per View) is also used as the new term for contextual adware displays. As the perceived newness of PPV (it wasn’t really new just the affiliates were newer than the days of Gator and emergence of 180Solutions) as a traffic source, the company was rebranded as AffPlaybook. While Ford has expanded the information into areas such as Facebook and mobile, CPV/PPV remains at the core of his training.
In addition to forum access, a AffPlaybook membership includes access to several automated tools. Some of these include:
- PPV Scraper: a tool that scrapes organic and paid URL’s to use in PPV campaigns. These would be domains that would trigger the contextual ad
- PPV Spy Tools: a set of tools which provides competitive intelligence of other PPV ad campaigns. It is powered by BoxOfAds.
- Target Expander: a tool that provides variations of domains to quickly expand the targets for a PPV campaign.
- Landing Page Clone Bot: downloads all images, scripts and files of a landing page. I’m sure it’s only used to clone the users own landing page and never to scrape someone else’s landing page (like those found with the PPV Spy Tools).
- Pop-Up Previewer: allows the user to preview what their landing page will look like in the actual pop-up by the adware. It even includes the adware’s logo shown on the pop-up.
- PPV Leak Checker: Allows you to view the landing page “through the eyes of adware” and check for leaks. Admittedly this tool is a bit amusing. Basically it lets the user know to what degree a particular contextual adware network is siphoning traffic from the ads. This is because contextual ad networks have no qualm about delivering other contextual ads on the ads they just served. It’s a dog eat dog world.
Overall, the tools facilitate affiliates improving both the efficiency and scale of PPV/CPV traffic.
While AffPlaybook revolves heavily around the CPA side of the business, that doesn’t mean that the CPS side of the business isn’t affected. Affiliates aren’t always exclusive in one area. Nor does it mean that traditional merchants aren’t impacted by ending up in the target lists, even if it isn’t one of their affiliates. Contextual adware networks generally serve two types of ads now: pop-ups and link injections. For example, TrafficVance serves injected text links. Any site is at risk for these types of ads which are potentially confusing to the consumer and impact your site traffic and monetization. Pop-ups often use scripts in the pop-up to mislead the end-user that the pop-up is coming from the site they are visiting. This increases the click-through rate of the ad. Considering that many of the ads are promoting CPA Network offers, it can be a branding issue to have a pop-up being delivered stating “A special offer for merchant.com visitor’s”.
Ford has made his original PPV Playbook e-book available for free. If nothing else, it can give you insight into the world of contextual adware affiliate campaigns. You can download a copy here.
