Testing! Goggles on, Please: Google AdSense and CPA
|
Written By Reprise Media | June 21, 2006 | Share This
|
|
Is Google quietly trying out a payment system for AdSense that would reward publishers on a Cost-Per-Action basis? Philipp Lenssen points to a blog by David Jackson at Seeking Alpha, reprinting an email invite from Google AdSense. Snip follows:
“The Google AdSense team would like to invite you to test a feature that provides you with a new way to earn revenue from your website by hosting ads that are compensated based on a Cost-Per-Action [CPA] basis. These ads are very different in that you will be able to choose amongst a selection and you will also have more flexibility in promoting them…”
AdSense currently rewards publishers on a Cost-Per-Click basis, meaning they earn cash for every click on an ad. Unfortunately, this system is relatively easy to defraud by writing a simple program that registers numerous clicks without human involvement. A CPA system would require some sort of additional action after a click in order to pay out, like a purchase or a registration, a process that would be significantly harder to automate (and in the case of purchases, prohibitively expensive).
Google’s email to Jackson also contained a brief FAQ about the test, which indicated that unlike regular AdSense ads, these ads won’t be contextually placed. Instead, participants would specifically choose what ads to display on their sites from a relatively small selection.
The FAQ included tips on how to optimize revenues from such ads (”Look to integrate the ad within the page…Ads that are relevant to the interest of your site visitor also tend to perform better”), and suggested that publishers would have “more flexibility” in promoting the ads than usual - for instance, “Try JetBlue Today” is ok, while “Click here” is not. We’re not exactly sure whose ads will appear, but they’re not your run-of-the-mill AdWords types; Google’s drawing from a “limited group of high quality advertisers” (JetBlue, mayhap?) for the test.
Topics: Google |
I hope this doesn’t spell a shift away from the Adsense pay per click model.
Wait, what am I thinking! Of course not, it is a huge cash cow and there will always be somebody willing to milk it.
I feel better now!
manual trackback:
http://webmaster-verzeichnis.de/blog/google-adsense-cpa-test/