I’m not going to rehash my previous post on this topic (still highly applicable – I highly recommend reading it before continuing with this post), but Google has finally launched Pay Per Action across their Adwords Network for US advertisers onto Adsense (not Search Network yet). I still believe that there are severe problems with the model, and Google will discover that it is not sustainable.
Search Engine Watch believes that Commission Junction’s days are numbered – I don’t think so! Andy Beal also has a similar view. We’ve been running CPA campaigns through Google for nearly 4 years now, and I think Google vastly under-estimates the risks and relationships at play with CPA marketing. The biggest concern though, is that Google’s internal arbitrage of CPC to CPA (which is what they’re doing, effectively), pushes prices CPC prices up in the short term, while they make mistakes that we’ve forgotten how to make, in our Clicks2Customers business.
Also, from the Inside Adwords blog, it’s not clear how they will deal with chargebacks – I’m guessing that the merchants have to factor this in? Can you imagine what’s next? Click-Order-Return (COR) fraud (i.e. Website owner clicks a merchant, places an order – merchant pays Google, Website owner returns goods – Google doesn’t refund merchant and Google pays Adsense site share of CPA). What if I’m a Google stockholder and I make a $1m purchase in order to boost the earnings, and then return or cancel the order – in theory, Google still gets paid and their stock goes up, but the merchant is out of business – just summising here, but I still don’t think CPA is viable for Google.
As I said in my previous post on this topic – Google has a smart bunch of guys, and I’m sure they will figure it out!
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