The Official Death of CPC
Tuesday, June 27, 2006 – Shanon Lewis

This week Google put the nail in the coffin on cost per click advertising. It seems that the last major bastion of click based commissions may be coming to an end with Google’s new beta model of payment per sale “action”. It is currently being tested on a select group of websites, but I expect it should be open to the public within the next 3-6 months, if not sooner.

The new program should not come as a surprise to affiliates. After all, CPC based programs have slowly been phased out in lieu of cost per acquisition and revenue share. Just as affiliate programs found the CPC model to be riddled with click fraud, Google is also feeling the flaw of the original Adsense system.

So how will this impact current Adsense publishers? The new Google solution is kind of like a super affiliate program, in that advertisers only pay when a sale is made. This increases the amount of the commissions for publishers, but it will definitely decrease the number of commissions awarded. With that publishers have an opportunity to make more money or less money, depending on how they use the system currently.

Let’s face it, getting paid for a click is the easiest kind of affiliate marketing. Right now a good number of publishers have made tons of money just funneling untargeted traffic to Google advertisers. There is very little effort made to pre-condition these buyers for purchase, as the end result did not matter until now.

Needless to say this new model will also impact affiliate programs. Now that businesses everywhere can basically get an affiliate program for free using Google. Advertisers will have access to targeted affiliate traffic and no long term commitment. Whilst this at best a very basic principal of affiliate marketing, it is quite attractive to advertisers. There is no wooing of affiliates or providing them with tools, simply sign-up at Google and you get access to their traffic and don’t have to pay a dime until you make something from it.

Serious affiliates who have built websites based on targeted audience segmentation and reach new visitors with useful content will love the new CPA program. Those affiliates who have paid the rent using click fraud robots that just spend the day clicking on their Adsense links will surely be running for the hills on this one.

Either way, the reality that CPC is dead or dying is here to stay. This is the end of an era for affiliate marketing. It proves that just having traffic is not as powerful as attracting a real audience. Now get to work establishing yourself as something more or be left in the dust wondering what to do when Google finally buries CPC for good.

http://www.cbronline.com/article_feature.asp?guid=120E0FA1-4AFD-479A-AC9E-408E9E8EDF98

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/?p=3561

About the Author

Shanon Lewis is a web marketing specialist with over 8 years of search engine placement, e-mail marketing and affiliate management experience. She is part of the expert team at http://www.affiliateprograms.com, the premiere marketing destination for affiliates online.