Google AdWords up until now has been purely Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Pay-Per-Thousand (CPM). The Google AdWords team has broke the news that AdWords will now allow for Cost-Per-Action (PPA). What does this mean for affiliate marketing?
I used to work for Commission Junction and I feel they have by far the best platform right now in the affiliate marketing industry. Google’s tap on affiliate marketing through this PPA addition will effect the affiliate marketing industry for sure, but I don’t feel it will come close to competing with CJ or LinkShare on the larger scale.
What advantage does CJ have over Google AdWords PPA? Scalability. CJ lets you put the links where you want, format them how you want, gives you tons of different banner sizes, lets you integrate them contextually — and basically gives you the flexibility to do whatever you want. CJ also provides advertisers with percentage rates to give publishers.
I haven’t tested out the AdWords system yet as it’s still in beta and I don’t have any real product I can be selling right now. I do feel however, that it will impact their PPC clients a lot. I have a strong feeling that a lot of their advertisers that were doing purely PPC or CPM will shift over to PPA. This could dramatically lower or dramatically raise net revenue for Google.
As everything else with Google, PPA is still in beta. With the feature in beta, they could find that it was unsuccessful and remove the feature altogether, but I don’t see that happening as they’ve devoted so much time to developing it.
This is an interesting addition to the AdWords platform and I am eager to see how it plays out in the coming months with AdWords advertisers.
