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CPA ads in Google Adsense may hurt publishers

by Darren

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A move towards CPA (Cost Per Action) ads could deliver a hurting to Adsense publishers. CPA ads are very attractive to advertisers because they lower their cost of acquisition for leads or sales. However, there’s a big flaw inherent in this type of set up: it’s not always the publishers fault that the end user doesn’t convert on the advertiser’s end.

In fact, a lousy landing page ensures low conversions, which means publishers will be punished for an inept marketer’s miscues.

Worse yet, there’s a double sting from this. Not only do you reward crappy marketers for bad landing pages by discounting the price they pay, but you also punish excellent publishers by discounting the amount you pay them for traffic on their website. No way is this the direction Google should take the whole program in. In fact, this could be so bad for publishers that it would be the beginning of the end of most webmaster’s best performing revenue maker.

If this becomes just another option for people and doesn’t become the default way campaigns are run, it might not be too bad. But if people realize they can put up bad pages and only pay when they get sales, you can expect a ton more low-quality landing pages to be made! That’s not what the world needs more of, IMHO. What the world needs now is love sweet love, not steaming piles of fetid adsense junk.

Time will tell how this plays out. It makes you wonder just how slow revenues are getting at Google. We have Video Adwords introduced a few weeks back and now they’re working on CPA. This may eventually turn Google Adsense in the direction of being a large affiliate plan.

What do you think of Google’s CPA experiment?

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