Chico_Loco - 10:53 pm on Jun 25, 2006 (gmt 0)

In my opinion, Google created a great advertising program/model in the beginning, or at least they were the first to successfully capitalize on it. Most of the things that have been introduced since by Google give the impression that the company is not as creative and innovative as I thought they were in the beginning.

It remains to be seen, but I believe that a CPA model has the following fundamental flaws, which most likely cannot be rectified:

1) The tracking cookies will eventually end up in programs that block tracking, just as happened to CJ & others.

2) Unless Google are the shopping cart system, there is no way to verify the volume of sales. Merchants (as a whole) will invariably seek to corrupt the tracking of the system.

3) Customers that order via telephone (such as myself) cannot be tracked, so publishers won't get fair credit for sales.

4) As a publisher, I'm not interested in giving visitors away in the *hopes* that they might buy something elsewhere. If I'm sending visitors away from my site, I want them to be bought from me (PPC), otherwise I'd rather keep them on my site thank you very much. That's free branding, and I won't be letting others' companies get anything free from me.

5) Refunds & fraud will become a major problem. Advertisers will want the ability to invalidate commission payments for orders that are returned or are found to be fraudulent. Once they have that ability they will abuse it by incorrectly invalidating some of their commission payments in order to minimize their expenditure. This would be impossible to track, unless of course Google were doing the shipping on all items, which isn't even remotely likely.

6) Defining a global percentage as a commission rate is going to be very difficult. If an item sells for $10, I want at least 25%, otherwise it's not worth it. But, merchants of items in the $1000+ range aren't too likely to be generous enough to give a 25%+ rate of commission.

Of course... what do I know!?