Is PPC to CPA Dead?

With the recent changes in the PPC industry, many CPA marketers are throwing in the towel assuming that sending pay per click (PPC) traffic to cost per action (CPA) offers is dead and unprofitable.

Google Adwords is the search engine leader with over 60% of the search market making it an obvious choice as a top PPC traffic source.

But Google Adwords has been cracking down on affiliate marketers and banning accounts that they feel do not offer a good user experience to their searchers.

And any of us doing CPA marketing realize that a vast majority of CPA offers being promoted are not really value adding.

These mass bannings started after the FTC introduced their new rules in early December 2009, to target marketers who were practicing deceptive marketing (i.e. flogs and farticles).

Many marketers lost their entire CPA businesses when Google Adwords decided to ban their accounts, but Google Adwords is not the only pay per click search engine in town.

Even though Google Adwords controls a lion’s share of the available pay per click traffic online, there are still many other sources of pay per click traffic that can be bought and in many cases, at a much lower cost.

The two other major players in the PPC game are Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter.  Although these two pay per click sources don’t nearly have as much traffic as Google Adwords, in my experience they do have better conversions.  Since the competition is not as much I also pay a lower cost per conversion versus advertising on Google Adwords.

If you take Yahoo and MSN’s search volume, they represent about 30% of the searches done on the Internet.  This is still a sizable amount of traffic to profit from.  Yahoo and MSN are planning to merge their pay per click marketing platforms, which I hope with give Google Adwords a formidable challenge.

There are dozens of second tier pay per click search engines such as 7Search.com, Looksmart.com, Ask.com, etc. that can provide marketers with thousands of targeted prospects each and every day.

But the problem with the second tier search engines is that they derive their traffic from a number of traffic partner sites.  This can results in a large number of fraudulent clicks from partner sources that are just out to steal click revenues.

These second tier search engines don’t have the sophisticated fraud technology that Google Adwords has, so it is hard to determine what clicks are real and which are fraudulent when they charge your account.

The key is to learn how to pass traffic partner IDs from second tier search engines so that you can have these fraudulent traffic sources shut off.  If you are disciplined enough to do this and can afford to lose some money up front to clean up the traffic, you will be left with decent converting traffic at the end of this exercise.

PPC traffic in my opinion is still the best converting traffic because it allows you to screen your prospects with your ads before they click and you are charged a click cost.

Although PPV traffic is also very lucrative, it is now getting very competitive and profit margins are shrinking fast with PPV traffic sources.

If you want to build a thriving PPC to CPA business, never allow one PPC traffic source to be more than 25% of your traffic spend. Diversify your PPC sources so that when one source disappears, you still have at least 75% of your PPC traffic.

So in conclusion, PPC to CPA is very much alive with great potential, even if you don’t rely on Google Adwords for PPC traffic.

Cheers. Gauher

A World Of Profitable Traffic Outside Of Google

Google Adwords represents just a small fraction of all the advertising traffic that is available on the Internet.  If affiliates took the time to understand other pay per click search engines, pay per view traffic, media buys and the many other methods of traffic generation, they could build an affiliate empire without Google Adwords.

I have created a short video that will show you how you can start making money in just a few hours using a second tier PPC search engine that doesn’t have a rigid quality score criteria and allows direct linking.

This is the lazy affiliate’s dream traffic source to work with.

Click on the link below and you will be taken to the video.

Click Here To Start Making Money

The key to start making money is to take action.  I don’t make any money from you signing up with 7search.  I am just grateful that they are a search engine that actually treats their advertisers with respect and makes the advertising experience much more pleasant.

Are you listening Google?

I welcome your comments on this video.

Cheers

Gauher Chaudhry

Google Adwords Drops The Axe Again

It appears that Google Adwords has done another round of banning of accounts with very little information other then a simple email that says that your account has been banned.

I know this because I received dozens of emails from my customers telling me that they had received the dreaded “You’ve Been Banned By Google” emails over the last week.

The problem with these emails is that they don’t tell anyone why they have been banned.  Calling or emailing Google Adwords to find out why is a bigger waste of time then watching a Lindsay Lohan movie.

They are not responding or answering any questions and I have yet to hear of anyone who has been banned ever getting their account reinstated.

This ban has not been limited to people running rebill offers but rather a mix of accounts promoting anything from Clickbank products, CPA offers, poor landing pages, own products etc.

In fact, I heard that a company that had been spending one million dollars a year with Google Adwords selling their own coffee product was banned without explanation.

I have yet to receive one of these emails, but I fully expect to if they are targeting advertisers running poor quality CPA offers (i.e email submits).

I am offender “numero uno” when it comes to promoting email submit CPA offers on Google Adwords.

Here is who they are nailing:

1. Offer Does Not Offer A “Good User Experience”

If you are running any sort of offer that Google deems not to provide their users with a “good user experience” according to Google’s judgement, they can ban you.

2. Rebill Offers

If you try to run a rebill offer (i.e. Acai, Biz Op), you risk the chance of having your account banned.  I have even heard that if you had run a campaign like this in the past that may be paused or deleted, they can still ban you.

3. Guilt By Association

If you have ever or had anyone log into a shady or banned Google Adwords account from your IP address,  you run the risk of having your account banned because Google targets all Google Adwords accounts that have ever been accessed by that same IP address.

Now, it isn’t that hard to open a new Adwords account, but it does require a bit of work.

1. Get a new computer

2. Get a new IP address

3. Open a new Adwords account under a new name and new credit card with a different name and address (i.e. mother-in-law?)

With the above being said, it appears that affiliate marketing on Google Adwords is dying a slow death and pay per click marketers need to start evolving their businesses outside of Google Adwords.  Also exploring other traffic courses such as media buys, ppv, natural seo, viode marketing, etc. doesn’t hurt either.

Google represents just a small fraction of the traffic available online.

At one-time, my monthly advertising budget with Google Adwords represented about 70% of my online budget.  Scary eh?  I have now brought this down to about 15% and will now never allow one traffic source to be more than 20% of my monthly budget.

I myself will not be content until my monthly ad spend with Google is just about 10% of my total monthly ad spend.

I have been working heavily expanding out with other pay per click search engines and pay per view traffic sources for the last two weeks.

I can understand Google Adword’s wanting to give their users a “good user experience”, but the manner in which they are offending their advertisers who have helped build their company is astonishing.

It appears that they don’t give a crap.

I have started moving my advertising dollars elsewhere.  I don’t have to deal with this unbelievable arrogance with other companies that sell paid traffic.

If Google simply worked with their customers to clean up poor advertisements (i.e. removing flogs, etc.), they would still have a lot of loyalty from their advertisers.

All good things come to an end.

When Google runs into hard times, they won’t regret the policies they put into place, but rather the manner in which they treated their advertisers when implementing them.

Any comments?