sja65 - 2:02 pm on Jun 22, 2006 (gmt 0)

Most of the replies to this story are coming from publishers - I'll give you my thoughts as the owner of an ecommerce site.

I currently won't use adwords on third party sites (except at extremely low prices). The conversions for me are about 10 times higher from the search network than third party sites. So the way things stand now, publishers aren't getting my money at all.

As for phone numbers, I have my 800 number all over my site and it accounts for less than 20% of my sales. This loss of tracking becomes moot when you read my next point.

Trust. With adsense now, Google looks at performance of the ad to know which ones to show. They look at click through and cost. They will be able to do the same thing with pay for action ads. If I don't pay out for anything or take all orders over the phone, Google will see no money and stop showing ads. An advertiser may be able to get a few thousand free clicks as Google builds statistics, but over a relatively short period of time, Google will know about how much an advertiser pays per click on average. In my case, I would be willing to pay about $8 per sale, and I have about a 10% conversion rate for semi targetted incoming clicks. That works out to about 80 cents per click (although it will be in chunks - 1 in 10 gets $8) for the publisher whereas with the ppc model, I won't go above 1 cent per click because of the lack of targetting and fraud.