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Adsense Switching To CPA

Posted by Paul B | August 8, 2007 .

Google’s Adsense program has to be the most well known and most used PPC (Pay Per Click) program on the net at the moment, but I wonder for how long? It looks like Adsense may be switching over to CPA (Cost Per Action) instead and if they do this it will have a huge effect on their loyal legions of publishers. I began to worry when I first got the e-mail from Google to tell me that I’d been upgraded to referrals 2.0 Straight away it amazed my how similar Adsense Referrals were to a traditional CPA network such as Commission Junction or Trade Doubler. There’s was always the niggling thought of I wonder how long it will until they phase out the CPC program?

Over the last few weeks some Adsense publishers have started to receive e-mails from Google notifying them that 5% of their add impressions are now going to be CPA ads and not CPC. I expect this figure to grow over time until, well who knows…. Whilst Google tries to reassure content publishers that showing CPA will not affect their ad revenue I’m not so sure. As a publisher you become entirely dependent on the seller having a good website with plenty of payment options and a fluid checkout process before you receive ANYTHING for showing their ads. Whilst it may be a great way for sellers to optimise their sale process it’s going to end up leaving a lot of publishers with very little to show for their efforts and I wonder just how many will switch networks?

Being completely honest and as somebody who manages Adwords campaigns for several clients I can see where Google are coming from with this, they have had to put up with a lot of stick recently about click fraud and the like. The only problem here is that you move the opportunity of fraud away from one group (publishers) and give it to another (the sellers). Speaking from experience, I spent 24 months promoting 2 online fishing tackle shops from 1 website. Whilst 1 affiliate program performed well (several sales a week) the other didn’t record a sale in those 24 months. It was obvious to me I was being cheated out of referrals but how do you prove it! If Google are heading that way then it’s something they are going to have to have strict controls over or they might find themselves without a publisher network to take a percentage off.

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