Here is an comment that I left on Techcrunch earlier today regarding my thoughts on Google launching their pay per action ads.

I’ve thought about this for a bit now and I’m not entirely sure that Google’s PPA service is going to work out great. I’ve been in affiliate marketing, am a web publisher using Adsense, and do a bit of SEM. Here are my thoughts on how it will affect all three:

Affiliate Marketing - The affiliate “publisher” is a totally different animal than the CPC publisher. Just because Google opens up the door to smaller publishers to become PPA publishers doesn’t mean that they will have the know how to run PPA. Trust me making the affiliate game work for you is very very difficult.

Adsense - Um….I think every publisher should have the option to choose to have a PPA ad or an Adsense ad up on their site. Without that choice I wholeheartedly expect my daily revenue to drop. Though I’m definitely sure that Google will optimize this out and make their publishers the most money.

SEM - If I was an advertiser why would I need an SEM firm? I can just put in a PPA price and leave it at that. Now if the PPA market gets saturated on Google’s publisher network (which it will, and fast), then SEM will once again be valuable. So after 6 months the effects will be minimal.

In the end truthfully I don’t think this announcement does a whole lot other than raise a few feathers.

share this story