Forum Moderators: martinibuster
It seems to me the solution to this is that Google starts charging based on conversions rather than clicks.
After reading a post in here, a completely reputable website could lose its AdSense account if a pissed off competitor decides to start clicking on your adsense ads.
BTW, signing up for Affiliate is a bit costly for me right now :)
I suggest you to join Commision Junction. There you'll find a whole world of affiliate/conversion issues.
...lose its AdSense account if a pissed off competitor decides to start clicking on your adsense ads.
I am not quite sure we have any reasonable data to confirm this. Or do we?
I find it bizarre that AdWords and AdSense people are not fighting for this.
For AdWords people - you can start safely using AdSense and not worry about fraudelent clicks.
For AdSense people - you don't have to worry about a bunch of teenagers and their click rings dilluting the value of what you provide.
I truly do not understand.
In addition of the amount of overhead that going to a system like this would bring. A lot of Adwords customers are not set up to track this, and a lot of them would never get setup. What you are asking is for Google to cut its advertiser base by half or more {yes ... even if they do it gradually}
Google isn't going to kick you off if your CTR goes through the roof for no good reason?
And even more important, how would publishers by protected from advertiser fraud if payment were based on conversions? This is a recurring issue with affiliate programs, where (unlike with AdSense) publishers can at least work only with vendors they know and trust.
You're saying that Google isn't going to kick you off if your CTR goes through the roof for no good reason?
Of course they will..
I am not quite sure we have any reasonable data to confirm this. Or do we?
Rigth also..
I think G has enough data to determine if the CTR has raised in the wrong way ... I think they can analize pretty well that data and know if it is you, your friends or your competitor who is clicking like crazy to raise the CTR ...
Google AS is a great program and bigger the site , biger the income for both AS and publisher and biger the convertion for Advertisers .. imagine if those big sites have to worry because a competitor is going to click to dump them out of the prog... I think Google handles that very well at this point.
CS.
You're saying that Google isn't going to kick you off if your CTR goes through the roof for no good reason?Of course they will..
A CTR spike can possibly mean fraud, but more often it does not. There are many other reasons for a CTR spike that have nothing at all to do with fraudulent clicks.
Will it cause Google to do a double take and check out your account for fraudulent clicks? Probably. Will you get suspended? Probably not.
There are many here who have had CTR spikes and are here to write about it, including myself ;)
However, the fact is I am an AdWords advertiser who really wants to also set up his own AdSense program. I have turned off Content sites on my programs because a) it doesn't convert, and b) I have no desire to fund a bunch of teenager click rings. Who, btw, are not stealing money from me (they aren't, I am not participating) they are stealing money from YOU, the AdSense publisher.
To address the other concerns - not everyone has to bid on a conversion basis. As I have said before (and this is why things need repeating) people can continue to use the "old flat rate bid".
I see no reason why the two systems can not happily co-exist side by side. If the "old flat rate bid" people are paying more then the conversion people are reporting, then they are going to get more 'air time'. Pure and simple.
The other fact is, that the smaller players will be slowly pushed out unless a conversion based system comes into play. Google is going to start dropping smaller players like RustyACE for no reason because statistically or than it will be impossible to cost effectively detect fraud at that level.
As for the payout concern - the reason Google is paying out more than CJ is because they opted all their AdWords players in and because they simply have 10 times the number of advertisers (has anyone looked at the requirements for joining CJ as an Advertiser? Yeeeesh!). This will continue to be the case even if they ad a conversion option for billing.
However, I also guarantee you that Google will seperate the two programs like Overture and everyone will see a dramatic drop in their CPC if a conversion system is not put into place, punishing not me but you, the AdSense publisher.. Who will be to blame for this?
Not Google, not the advertisers .. but the fraudster publishers who are ripping you off.
This is what people do not understand about the program. The fraudsters are *NOT* stealing from the AdWords subscribers, not from Google, they are stealing, pure and simple, from honest AdSense publishers. Even the people who are not really fraudsters, but have found a way to drive low quality traffic to the Ads while staying within the boundaries of the TOS. They are taking away from the AdSense publisher who has a useful, attractive, informational website that plays well within the ecommerce ecosystem.
In conclusion, something needs to be done. EFV had an interesting idea which was to let the Advertiser control who could advertise their products. My issue with that is that it pushes out the smaller guy, who I care a lot for because, well, I am a little guy! Whatever happens, though, the fact simply is, that the AdSense system is not a meritocracy as it stands and is fundamentally broken.
If Advertisers are not paying in CJ .. then just remove their link from your website. How can it get any simpler? That's why you can view EPC on CJ to see who's paying and who isn't.
The only problem is because it's not a double blind and it's tiered, the smaller guys don't get the same kind of consideration and attention the bigger guys do. Google can fix all that.
As to deciding what a conversion is, that is up to the Advertiser. They can pay if someone goes to a couple of web pages, if they lay down a credit card, if they download a demo, download a white paper, etc etc ad nauseum.
I have no desire to fund a bunch of teenager click rings.
Where is your proof of this? Do you specifically know of these click rings? Or are you hypothesizing in order to make a point?
BTW, advertiser fraud with CJ simply does not exist. That is a lack of education that people have.
I had to do a double take here.
There have been numerous threads from publishers who've had chargebacks... some of which chargebacks looked very suspicious. There are also threads of advertisers doing a runner and publishers losing money... as CJ won't cough up in such situations.
I had to do a double take here.
Me too. I know many who are out thousands of dollars by widespread commission reverals done this week by one company alone - and there was nothing fraudulent about any of the commissions at all. I have also seen other mentions of reversals and chargebacks as well.
And on the conversion aspect, there are many Adwords advertisers who don't want Google to know about what kinds of conversions they are making (regardless of what the privacy policy says).
"The elimination of CPC programs freed up the Compliance Department at CJ, composed of four people working full-time, to focus more on pay-per-lead fraud and compliance with the CJ Publisher Agreement and Privacy Policy." says Todd Crawford, vice president, strategic alliances for Commission Junction.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Why should publishers suffer because an advertisers' site is rubbish and no-one buys from them. Surely we've fulfilled our obligation by driving the traffic.
If you went to a newspaper and told them you wanted to advertise, but you'd only pay if someone actually buys a product from you as a result of that advert, they'd tell you to take a hike and rightly so. It's a pity more web publishers aren't taking the same stance.
There should be a balance to an advertising deal whereby both parties benefit and both share the risk. Why should publishers always be the ones to take the risk?
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Also, as I said many many times bidding by conversion would not be required. If you don't want anyone to know whats converting (but come on, you bid a keyword then it must be converting!) then just go flat rate bid. (Read that three times).
Also, Google has done a much better job of dealing with the "poor ad copy" issue than other ad networks have done. Traditionally, advertisers wanting cheap "branding ads" have bought CPC ads that have been intentionally designed not to get clickthroughs. With AdWords/AdSense, clickthrough rate affects placement, so there's a disincentive to create ads that send a message but don't get clicked.
It is up to Google to make sure that the high converting / high paying people are placed accurately on webpages.
They have the algorithms to make sure that the money is getting paid. They have the spidering techonology to make good fits between content and Advertisement.
The effort FastEddie talks about is not up to the publisher, it's not up to the advertiser, it's up to Google to make sure everyone is working smart.
And that's good, because there are a bunch of supersmart people at Google.
Sorry maybe didn't make myself clear enough. It is pay per sale or acquisition that I have problems with, more than cost per click. I think that is the jist of what transactiongeek was suggesting - only charging for clicks that convert. With pay per sale I think publishers take all the risk.
In an ideal world for me everything would be CPM, but I see the sense in CPC for these kind of systems and am fairly happy with adsense myself.
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All these people complaing about advertisers on CJ. If you have a problem with them, take them off your website. I just shake my head when a friend complains and complains and complains and then I go to their website, and the links are still there.
Replace advertisers on CJ. with "Adsense" and then We would not have the pleasure of having 110+ message threads ;)
Its all good transactiongeek, is all part of the discussion :D
BTW, anyone visiting Abestweb will see several threads complaining about some CJ merchants.
That's actually a great idea :) See you there.
Affiliate programs are more like a franchise. You talk about the product or company or something that the product does or that the company is involved in and you provide a link to the product or company. Your page / site whatever is a virtual extension of the company's online commercial presence and it needs a lot of focus.
Advertising is completely different. A webmaster who displays adverts is not guaranteeing to increase sales, but simply to show the advert to visitors... which may result in better branding, better sales etc.
It's difficult to argue that AdSense can be anything other than an advert. AdSense adverts change, relevant to the content of the page and they alternate even on that page, because you can only display a maximum of four. There is no way, that a webmaster could focus the page on the products being advertised in the same way that he or she might with an affiliate program.
Consequently, if AdSense is advertising, rather than a box displaying affiliate programs (which it clearly isn't), asking for a pay-per-action model is rather like saying: you will only pay your local newspaper for the advert on page seven, if people walk into your shop holding the paper and say "I've just seen your advert!".
Advertising is all sorts of things above and beyond immediate conversions. How often do you see a Coke commercial on TV and immediately walk down to the shop to buy a can?
Anyways, as I have said several times I am suggesting adding conversion as a compliment to what we have right now and not replacing the flat bid rate approach.
