What's a reasonable PPC rate for a partner site?

CPC for very highly qualified traffic

[kordianGnot]

I'm considering partnering with a site that offers a high CPA through its general affiliate program, but upon contacting them, they said they'd prefer a direct partnership with a CPC model, and that they'd pay ~$0.26/visit "to start". My site has very similar purposes, and would basically act as a search engine for this other site as my site's navigation/search structure is better, so the CPA conversion rate would have been very high.

Does $0.26 per visit seem reasonable? I'm assuming that that CPA was formulated with the idea that referrals from general purpose sites would have low conversion rates and they'd get a lot of general advertising traffic per action.

When negotiating these things with larger sites, does it make sense to haggle, or is there potential for renegotiation later?

Thanks everyone!

[kordianGnot]

Actually, how does PPC usually get determined between partner sites? Is there usually a trial price, and then after the publisher has established their value to the advertiser, they renegotiate, or is usually determined at the beginning?

[SlimKim]

it all depends on your vertical and your geo ... $0.26 cpc is way to high for some verticals and geos and it's a tad low for some financial and health subjects from traffic from the USA, Canada or the UK.

But it's an ok place to start from and you are free to negotiate any time you want --- you can be sure they will offer you less real quick if the conversion rates are lower than they expect

or if they have a cpa program and you orefer that, i would stick to my guns and demand it ... they are confident you will convert or they would not offer you a cpc deal as cpa is less risk to them

you could compare Adsense cpc on this site with their offer

Hope you get what's best for you,
Slim

[kordianGnot]

Hi, thanks for the great reply! I ended up negotiating it up by about 50%, and they said that they weren't comfortable going higher because they weren't sure how it would convert, but they seemed to imply that they'd be up for renegotiating up if it ends up converting like I think it will.

For reference, mine is a pretty pricey vertical in terms of ads, and the adwords are quite expensive, but it's hard to compare with adwords, because the expected usage case is to hop back and forth between the two sites, versus an adword which would ideally bring and keep the user, who might then visit 10 pages. Adwords would be a one-time charge, whereas a user might rack up 3 or 4 visits from my site.