I’m doing a session on Thursday with Catherine Seda, Adam Viener & Jeremy Palmer on Affiliate Arbitrage on eComXpo – a fully online conference (i.e. you don’t have to leave your chair!).
Our show starts at 10am EST (5pm South African time) on Thursday March 22 and it promises to be really worthwhile. You can signup at eComXpo for free and the rest of the shows started earlier today and continues until Thursday.
On the note of Affiliate Arbitrage, Chris from SearchAnyway.com covered Brian Geddes piece on Search Arbitrage. There is often a misconception due to non-standard terminology in the industry. Let me clarify:
Both Search & Affiliate Arbitrage can be construed as affiliates bidding on search keywords and sending traffic directly to a merchant in exchange for a Cost Per Action payout, whereby the affiliate is paying the search engine on a CPC basis. Brian’s definition of Search Arbitrage is when scummy marketers use landing pages full of adverts being paid to them on a CPC basis, and buy CPC traffic from the search engines, on the basis that they should earn more per click than the click costs them on the search engines. To me, this is commonly known as Click-Pimping, something that I do not consider good for either the advertiser or the end user/searcher. I really call on the search engines to take these “pimps” to task and remove sites that offer no value at all.
The key difference is that CPA-CPC arbitrage has implied risk reward ratios, and the more efficiently the campaign is managed, the better for both merchant and marketer. CPC to CPA arbitrage also means in general that the arbitrager is using the company’s display URL in order to increase reach across the long tail of keywords in order to generate cost efficient click prices. Google is already gearing up to do this now, indicating the value in this space, as per my previous post.
CPC-CPC arbitrage has no value to anyone, except the arbitrager – the end user is irritated but doesn’t realize that they are generating money for the “pimp”. The additional landing page is of no value.
Regardless, we are left with a misnomer around what Clicks2Customers (CPC-CPA arbitrage) does, and what “Click-Pimpers” do.
My suggestions for names for CPA-CPC arbitrage are:
- Performance Search Marketing
- Affiliate Search Arbitrage
- Search Arbitrage
- Affiliate Arbitrage
With regard to CPC-CPC arbitragers – let’s just call them Click-Pimples and be done with it! 
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