Google AdSense Referrals – Now With Actions
AdSense Referrals 2.0 – CPA Ads EditionAdSense has opened up their Cost Per Action ads beta test to every AdSense publisher.
Now this program has a really unfortunate name of “Referrals” and they have lumped it in with their old referrals program: you remember the one where you got one whole dollar if someone installed Firefox with the Google toolbar, or up to $100 dollars if you were lucky enough to sign up one of the last half dozen or so webmasters on the Internet who wasn’t already using AdSense.
Ya, those referrals.
Because of this unfortunate branding of the new CPA ads into the referrals section of an AdSense account, most webmasters will probably not even notice them.
The new AdSense referrals (yuck – “2.0″), you can read the official announcement on the AdSense blog, do look interesting though for a few reasons.
First you can hand pick your ads. I went and looked through the inventory, which is pretty light at this point, I found the following one under the keyword “make money”:
A couple things to notice off the top.
- I can plug it directly into a post.
- It is formatted by my stylesheet, not by Google. Essentially it is a text link, not an ad block as with their contextual ads
- I can’t control the text of the ad
- It is JavaScript code, so you’ll still need AdSense Deluxe to be able to embed it into a WordPress post.
- You can choose a keyword or category and have all the ads in that group rotate into your space if you want them to be like traditional AdSense.
The most important thing about this ad is that if you click on it, I don’t receive payment, only if you perform some kind of action on the advertiser’s site.
Are you seeing the future yet?
There are two important ramifications of these new ads for publishers and advertisers.
The end is probably coming for pay per click ads. With these types of ads available, which reduce the possibility of click fraud and make much more sense financially for the advertiser, why would anyone pay for per click ads?
In most cases, I don’t think they will.
The importance of knowing business metrics like the lifetime value of a customer. It will be even more important for advertising companies to know what they can afford to pay for a client. With the price of these ads being upwards of $15 – $20 per action, bidding could become intense in hot markets.
A superior business will be able to pay more. If I had a full sales backend on my Real Blog Videos for example and I knew the lifetime value of my customer was $200, then it wouldn’t be unreasonable for me to offer a $50 payout for a sale of my $15 product.
Pressure on Publishers
I believe these ads will put greater quality pressure on publishers as well. The cost per click ads were a volume business model (more visitors more clicks in general more money) but these ads will be more of a quality system.
They will work best in reviews and pre-sell type pages as opposed to basic keyword targeting that worked fine with the contextual ads.
In short, if these ads gain traction at all, high quality publishers will likely benefit with greater payouts and lower quality sites that rely on traditional AdSense will suffer.
Run A Non-Traditional Affiliate Program?
As I think about these Cost Per Action ads more, I had the thought about whether they could be used to run an affiliate program of sorts for a service that would normally be difficult to manage.
For example, if you wanted to reward people for referrals to your blog installation service, or your small business SEO service it would be tough with the traditional affiliate tools currently available.
And of course, they could be used for traditional affiliate type advertising. Currently I pay about $11 to an affiliate for my Real Blog Videos, so I may toss an ad into AdSense since that will likely get me a lot more exposure for my videos than simply having it on ClickBank.
Google Referrals 2.0 Cost Per Action ads represent some interesting new options for both publishers and for advertisers. I’ll be playing with them for sure to increase revenues on my sites and to increase sales of my products and services.
Browse Timeline
Comments ( 1 Comment )
Peter drew added these pithy words on Jul 31 07 at 10:26 pmI’m amazed, The new Adsense Referrals “2″ started rolling out 3 weeks ago
This is the absolute biggest event to happen for Adsense marketers, since the arrival
of 1 cent clicks 18 months ago.
You can now turn these 1 cent clicks into huge profits.
I cannot believe there is not a huge buzz about this all over the internet. There should be!
This is what all those people how have found it hard to make money with Adsense have
been waiting for.
I’m starting the BUZZ now.
See my Video Demonstration
http://www.peterdrew.net/internet-marketing/adsense-referals-how-to-video-demo/
See why all the other CPA offer sites like Azoogle are going to feel the pain.
Peter Drew