drall - 1:56 pm on Aug 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

Hello ASA and thanks in advance for trying to address the CPA problems.

Here is our problems with the CPA program and why we no longer run any of the campaigns in any capacity.

1. In order to weed out the 90% of the folks who are obviously not looking for conversions and are purely looking to skirt the system we have to select individual products that we feel have a decent likelyhood of converting. This feature does not work currently, either you still show other unselected campaigns or the campaigns do not last past 10 am est and we have a big blank space or untargetted junk.

2. Any webmaster that has affiliate experience understands that properly structuring a page to lead to a conversion is the biggest part of increasing your conversion ratios. IE the page is well written, explains the benefits of said product in detail and has little to no other advertising on the page.

When we choose a widget from the cpa program and then add it to what we feel is the appropriate page with our users that would be of great interest to our users and a high chance of converting with our users and the advert either doesnt show due to lack of inventory or shows other adverts then the cpa program is basically useless for this.

3. Given that the above points out how basically useless it is to target our users to individual campaigns then we are left with no other choice then to insert a general RON block and hope the system selects appropriate adverts. The targetting is ok but the ads generate abyssmal ctr rates and almost no conversions. This is because the system does not know our sites/users as well as we do.

In summary we tested the CPA program across many authority sites and in a endless amount of configurations and for us at least the CPA is a complete failure. Maybe this is worded strongly but it is the truth, there is nothing I want more then to run Google CPA network wide to our large audience but when you select a family friendly advert for your family friendly site and a adult related product shows then it is unusable. We have spent a great deal of our time at our expense testing your program and hope you take this feedback seriously.