Is PPA Dead?

[abbottsys]

I notice there's not much talk about PPA (Pay Per Action) anymore. I tested it briefly a while back and shut down my test because of extremely low volume.

If the distribution channel (publishers) don't endorse an ad format then it's dead, since no distribution means advertisers are not interested.

PPA is a strange product, since it asks publishers to take a gamble on what happens on the advertisers website. Guess they didn't want to take that gamble, and prefer to stay with the good old PPC ads. Can't say I blame them.

So, what's your take, is PPA dead?

[SearchEnginePPC]

No, but it should be!

I wasn't getting much traffic either until July 3rd. Google started requiring ~5% of their AdSense advertisers to show PPA ads in addition to or instead of their regular CPC or CPM ads. Since then, my clients' accounts have seen quite an influx of traffic that started all of a sudden.

The problem is that the sites we're getting traffic from are mostly non-English international sites, which isn't our target audience at all. This is despite the fact that we chose US targeting on the campaign. And as a result, we're having a heck of a time getting a refund on that incredibly poor quality traffic. Google says that we've seen conversions, so it must have been good for our business. I say that they must have been fraudulent conversions (many had 100% or higher conversion rates on the Placement Performance Report).

So, my advice would be to stay away from PPA for a while until they get the kinks worked out in the system.

[Discovery]

As a long time advocate of Site exclusion, Site Targeting and even PPA I have to say I am not real excited about how Google has rolled out these features. Or perhaps in how they have communicated what the ultimate plan is. I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that Google and Google alone has had the double OOs to launch these features it is a fantastic starting point for SEM. YSM and even Adcenter who BOTH had new platforms from which to beat G to the punch in these areas chickened out.

With that said, the site exclusion can only be as effective as the placement reports are accurate. As we all know the placement reports are full of generic "other" "Error" and "Domain Ad" line items that we have no control over. Put that on top of trying to kill a thousand siteroaches a day and you can quickly see the workflow process needs to be automated and integrated a bit tighter into the campaign management.

PPA is a great concept too, and certainly nothing new.. CJ.com has proved it can work. But it MUST be mandatory, or have the proper incentives for the publishers to want to use it. Why would they want to put the burden on themselves to produce quality traffic? why would they trust advertisers to have quality converting websites? It is relatively easy to perform click fraud and impression fraud but conversion fraud raises the bar significantly. These are areas Google needs to tighten up both with Policy, incentives and clear communications

Advertiser views placement reports
Identifies poor sites - Check box for each one to exclude - select campaigns to apply exclusions to - hits site exclude button - Done

Identifies great sites - Checks off site - clicks site target - PPC, Audio, PPA, other, and goes through the campaign set up process.

On the other side, publishers can identify and reject our sorry advertising sites from their publisher sites.

G needs to give an over the horizon pitch to all. They should demonstrate how these 3 tools work together now and will in the future. If the process is highly automated then publishers and advertisers alike would have the checks and balances necessary to generate the returns we are all working so hard for.


Discovery

[AussieWebmaster]

We are just about ready to start playing with this on both ends....

[Shmuel]

We've seen some more clicks this month, but still no conversions. With how the Content Network has treated us int he past, I'm glad that this is going slow. It takes next to no effort on my part to manage. Every few weeks I go in and increase my bid slightly, just to see what that does for clicks/conversions.

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by AussieWebmaster

We are just about ready to start playing with this on both ends....

Let us know what you find. So far my results have been very dissapointing.

[AdWordsRep]

Hi all,

I'm back from vacation today, and slowly getting back to posting on SEW again.

I have just passed the link to this thread along to the appropriate folks - so this is a good chance to have your comments heard, whether positive or negative. So I hope you'll have at it.

It's really nice to be back. I've missed spending time here with all y'all.

AWR

[abbottsys]

AWR -- Welcome back!!!! We missed you.

[AussieWebmaster]

AWR will we see you in San Jose?

[webpundit]

Adotas contains an article about Google's PPA program and states how "Google starting to test CPA in content moves them one giant step towards not just the ad network but the arbitrage business"
http://www.adotas.com/2007/08/google-and-cpa/

I take this to mean that Google is leveraging the Content Network to collect conversion data through PPA ads. They will then use this data to plan their expansion of PPA ads into the AdWords arena, possibly leading to Adwords Arbitrage – akin to AdSense Arbitrage.

What are your thoughts on this? The author of the article seems to indicate that Google is going to get into arbitrage, and I'd love to hear other opinions to clearly understand why and how.

[SearchEnginePPC]

Just thought I'd come back to post real quick as a follow up. My client's account did receive a refund for the PPA traffic that was outside of our campaign settings (English, US). I wasn't sure if it was going to go through, but I'm glad it did since that poor quality traffic accounted for more than 30% of our PPA spend.