What is a Fair PPA Bid for you?

[Discovery]

To Adsense publishers;

My company has been dabbling in the beta PPA program and have not seen our campaigns gain too much traction with publishers.

I thought I would go right to the source and get your input.

Now we know two things. Advertisers want to lower our cost per acquisition and you the publishers want to increase your revenue over the traditional paid per click model.

What reasons would you avoid using the PPA model?

What reasons would you switch to PPA?

What are the key criteria you may have to determine if a PPA bid offer by an advertiser is worthy of taking over PPC ad space?

Here is an example: Say an advertiser is achieving a $20 Cost Per Acquisition on content match over a long period of time. Is there a formula you would use to determine a PPA price point that would outperform the current PPC value of that advertiser for your site?

We have no problems sharing the wealth, so long as we both increase our revenue over the existing PPC model. Your comments are always valued.


Discovery

[Discovery]

Well I guess this is what I expected. No response and this is probably the same reason PPA has tanked as well.

Not saying all of adsense participants are fraudseters, however there are a lot who know click and impression fraud is easy, not so easy or too time consuming to conduct form/conversion fraud.

Or perhaps many site owners know they have highly unqualified traffic and know their conversion ratio's would stink.

Its too bad that advertisers just can weed out the junk clicks.
Quality adsense partners loose out, advertisers loose money, Google cleans up and so do the garbitragers.

Discovery

[Dan01]

We publish a site and get paid thousands per month on PPC. We would be lucky to make a hundred or more for a PPA per month. It is happening more now that we made some changes and offered more links per page. But it still wont pay the bills.

I would say it depends on what you are selling. If you are giving away t-shirts, you probably would not want to pay much. If you are selling mortgages, you may pay $10 or more per action.

That is my opinion.

[Marcia]

What reasons would you avoid using the PPA model?Three big lacks: Lack of control, lack of relationship, lack of flexibility.

There's no direct relationship or contact with the merchant (or ad buyer) so there's no way to negotiate for higher commissions, longer cookie length, choice of creative, etc. etc. It's fixed in stone, both for payout and return days, and there's absolutely no chance of any degree of control or negotiation over how well the pages do financially.

Not to mention that for types of products, banners and text links to the *merchant's* choice of landing pages are the very least desirable options. No product links, no datafeeds, no control over how I promote their goods.

One example: Customer clicks on a $17.99 item and ends up buying $95.00 worth of merchandise. Figuring on 10% commission, that's $9.50 for that sale. How much could the PPA possibly pay for that type of an action, when the end sale amount is an unknown factor? $1? $2?

Another example: Durable goods, customer will be paying in the $1K to $3K range if they buy what the page they came in on is promoting; but they'll be shopping around for price before purchasing. If they come back and buy 2 months later and I've got a 120 or 180 cookie, I'll get about 8% of the sale amount. Couple of sales like that, I tell the affiliate manager I'm "not too thrilled with 8%," I'll get upped to 10%. If this one gives 90 return days and competitors give 120 return days, before even any sales are made I can take a shot at getting the cookie length lengthened (which usually works). That's a far cry from 30 return days and a fixed dollar amount.

How much would a merchant offer for PPA, when some low ticket items on the site sell for only a couple hundred? $5? $10? And if there are 30 return days, if a purchase is made two months later, I get nothing.

What reasons would you switch to PPA?On an individual page/product basis, if there was a page already getting traffic and it turned out that there no regular affiliate merchants with decent percentages and terms (aka return days) and the click value was very low, it would be no loss to put the PPA on the pages rather than pull the pages altogether - unless I were deliberately trying to decrease the number of pages on the site (which I have been doing on a few sites).

[Dan01]

When I think of PPA, I also think about the leads, rather than just sales. Many mortgage companies pay for leads, for instance. They sell lists too.

Amazon is by far our biggest PPA account. We do better with them than Linkshare or Commission Junction. I bet it could be different with everyone. We do better with Commission Junction than Linkshare, and better with Linkshare compared to Double Click Performics.