Forum Moderators: martinibuster
[google.com...]
I just signed up, but is there any contextual doctor left in the house?
i wonder if the list of advertisers is a subset of the list of merchants that use google checkout. if so, google could track conversions and chargebacks precisely.
FarmBoy
FarmBoy
Or, at least a bunt.
Even if the payout is relatively low, if it gives us the ability to put some carefully targetted ads on the 80% or so of our page views that currently show no advetising without hurting eCPM, it could be a homerun.
If contextual ads don't work on certain pages, CPA ads will probably be even less successful. Why waste the space?
If contextual ads don't work on certain pages, CPA ads will probably be even less successful. Why waste the space?
I can see where just the opposite will be true.
I have a site for people in the widgets industry where I review and report on general use equipment & machinery. Contextual ads show widgets ads, which makes sense, but my visitors are at my site looking for information on general use equipment that can be used in the widgets industry.
If I can select a CPA ad for general use equipment, that would provide better targeting.
FarmBoy
Google is becoming the 800 pound gorilla of online advertising. Let's say they really take over the CPA market, putting the other guys out of business. How dependent on one company do you want to be?
If contextual ads don't work on certain pages, CPA ads will probably be even less successful. Why waste the space?
One, what FarmBoy said.
Two, you never know for sure until you try, that's what Adsense is all about.
Three, half the reason we don't show the poor eCPM ads is because the poor targetting makes the pages look junky, even though we bury them under the fold. But, we've learned over the years that our own widgets actually sell a little better on pages running Adsense. Probably sets something off in the readers brains that this is a commercial venture rather than a pure hobby site. It's funny, but ad blindness doesn't just apply to Adsense, and since we are soft-sellers, we often hear from visitors who never even noticed that we sell the very widget they are asking for.
Like everything else, there are trade-offs, but if the low eCPM doesn't kill our higher earning pages, we'd love to experiment with ads we can control. It just make me personally nuts when our page about widgets is displaying an ad for people who once saw a widget on the beach and might now consider on a senior's cruise.
The Inside AdWords post indicates a pageview can be a completed action. That would seem to invite fraud. I wonder what means of control Google will allow to advertisers?
Google has already said that actions are advertiser-defined. I'd guess that Google will have an easier time selling CPA to e-commerce advertisers than to advertisers who define an "action" as an inquiry or another activity that isn't a purchase.
I'd guess that Google will have an easier time selling CPA to e-commerce advertisers than to advertisers who define an "action" as an inquiry or another activity that isn't a purchase.
what is this guess based on? i can imagine lots of advertisers who happily pay for rss subscriptions, newsletter signups or mortgage inquiries. each of these actions has a dollar amount tied to it. if an advertiser knows, for example, that a newsletter subscriber is worth on average $10 per month in revenue, why wouldnt an advertiser be happy to pay, say $5 for a newsletter signup?
sure there is a higher chance of fraudulent signups, but this rate is calculatable by the advertiser and it gets factored into the amount she is willing to pay.
I suggest trying it out and placing both CPC and CPA ads on the same page. Possibly place the CPA ads in spaces that you usually don't put ads since you won't have to worry about smart pricing.
if an advertiser knows, for example, that a newsletter subscriber is worth on average $10 per month in revenue, why wouldnt an advertiser be happy to pay, say $5 for a newsletter signup?sure there is a higher chance of fraudulent signups, but this rate is calculatable by the advertiser and it gets factored into the amount she is willing to pay.
As a non-AdWords user, I confess ignorance on how conversion tracking works.
I have an email newsletter. As an advertiser, if I could count only subscribers who confirm their subscription as "converted," I would certainly pay more for that than if I have to count every subscription, confirmed or not, as a conversion.
FarmBoy
The pay for some of these products are VERY high and worth placing their ads up.
I don't know what you mean by very high, but I have a product I sell for $80. I'm currently paying $55* per sale to affiliates and I'd certainly like to make that same offer available to publishers via CPA and see how the results compare to the straight affiliate sales.
* Before anyone asks, I can do that because of back end sales
FarmBoy
I have a product I sell for $80. I'm currently paying $55* per sale
Heck, I'd buy them myself at a loss and make it up in volume:-)
Are the Beta testers for CPA still running it, or is Google doing a full restart?
so as a common advertiser, under the aspect of cost-effectiveness what do i choose:
if i'm a real salesman and manage to convert extremely well, i will choose cpm.
if i'm and having a hard time with selling my widgets, i will choose cpa.
everything in between is cpc. it must be, because cpc is where the balance of marketing risk is between the advertiser and the publisher. consequently, cpc is the marketplace where in the aggregate the most advertisers and publishers are to be found. consequently, google cpc is since years the killer application of the online marketing business where google earns its billions through advertiser and publisher satisfaction.
i can only imagine google introducing cpa just wanting to have an entrance in the affiliate business to dig off the market share of the existing offerers. a nice product extension to gain even more dominance.
i can not imagine both players migrating to a cpa network on a large scale. this simply won't work out for most publishers, hence little coverage for advertisers and therefore not much business to be made.
on the other hand, advertisers wouldn't migrate to cpm - the preferred payout method for publishers - to a considerable extent for the reverse reason.
in conclusion, bad news for the cpa cheerleader crowd: everything will be as it is. cpc will rightly continue to rule the market.
As an advertiser I'd put my calls to action on cpm (where I pay the same low rate no matter how many of my calls to action are taken up), and my awareness ads as cpa where it will cost nothing at all unless visitors realise that they have a specific reason to go to my site now and perform the required action (and the ad don't encourage this).
Eventually it will dawn on the publisher that the cpa is not paying, and it will be time to move on and shear the next batch of sheep ...
"Real" advertisers are still doing CPM, because they understand the importance of branding, and they will continue to do CPM (with possibly a mix of CPC). CPC advertisers love the traffic and tradeoff for ROI. In the long run, CPA offers low cost to the advertiser (pays only for results) and a nice payoff (in the best cases) to the publisher, but usually very low return.
The move to CPA for Google makes a little sense, but they've also dabbled in print, radio and TV, so it's really not news. I actually think they should spend more time focusing on one area than taking scatter shots at all media.
Anyone else tried it yet? I wonder how quick it revenue shows up in your control panel?
From an advertiser's point of view this could be a good way to do CPM on the cheap. Advertisements are either awareness (Wudso washes whiter) or calls to action (Get 50% off Wudso today).
That strategy isn't likely to work for advertisers because publishers determine which ads to run. The publishers most interested in CPA are likely to be those who are willing to experiment--and if ads or advertisers aren't generating publisher revenue, they'll get whacked.
In the longer run, it's reasonable to assume that Google will find automated ways to tie placement (and impressions) to revenue production, just as it already does with CPC ads.
CPA works for a very low % of sites, maybe as little as 10%, maybe even less. This is product extension and "new Coke" for Google. It should have a very limited effect on CPC publishers.
Sure, but it could have a very nice effect on the 10% (or fewer) of publishers who do well with CPA. As you say, it's just a product extension, and publishers should simply regard it as an additional opportunity that they can use or not use, as they see fit.
CPA works for a very low % of sites, maybe as little as 10%, maybe even less.
CPC works on a very low percentage of our pages, around 20%. If CPA works on another 10%, and if we're defining "works" the same way, it could add 50% to our earnings. I'm assuming that the CPA ads won't contibute towards SmartPricing:-)
FarmBoy
My traffic converts very well and I'd like to have more choices of ads than I currently have without signing up with a zillion merchants - some of which may not pay on time or at all, etc.
The one thing I don't like about Adsense content ads is not being able to choose the advertisers - and there are too many ads that aren't well targeted or just inappropriate.
