With the recent changes in the PPC industry, many CPA marketers are throwing in the towel assuming that sending pay per click (PPC) traffic to cost per action (CPA) offers is dead and unprofitable.
Google Adwords is the search engine leader with over 60% of the search market making it an obvious choice as a top PPC traffic source.
But Google Adwords has been cracking down on affiliate marketers and banning accounts that they feel do not offer a good user experience to their searchers.
And any of us doing CPA marketing realize that a vast majority of CPA offers being promoted are not really value adding.
These mass bannings started after the FTC introduced their new rules in early December 2009, to target marketers who were practicing deceptive marketing (i.e. flogs and farticles).
Many marketers lost their entire CPA businesses when Google Adwords decided to ban their accounts, but Google Adwords is not the only pay per click search engine in town.
Even though Google Adwords controls a lion’s share of the available pay per click traffic online, there are still many other sources of pay per click traffic that can be bought and in many cases, at a much lower cost.
The two other major players in the PPC game are Yahoo Search Marketing and MSN Adcenter. Although these two pay per click sources don’t nearly have as much traffic as Google Adwords, in my experience they do have better conversions. Since the competition is not as much I also pay a lower cost per conversion versus advertising on Google Adwords.
If you take Yahoo and MSN’s search volume, they represent about 30% of the searches done on the Internet. This is still a sizable amount of traffic to profit from. Yahoo and MSN are planning to merge their pay per click marketing platforms, which I hope with give Google Adwords a formidable challenge.
There are dozens of second tier pay per click search engines such as 7Search.com, Looksmart.com, Ask.com, etc. that can provide marketers with thousands of targeted prospects each and every day.
But the problem with the second tier search engines is that they derive their traffic from a number of traffic partner sites. This can results in a large number of fraudulent clicks from partner sources that are just out to steal click revenues.
These second tier search engines don’t have the sophisticated fraud technology that Google Adwords has, so it is hard to determine what clicks are real and which are fraudulent when they charge your account.
The key is to learn how to pass traffic partner IDs from second tier search engines so that you can have these fraudulent traffic sources shut off. If you are disciplined enough to do this and can afford to lose some money up front to clean up the traffic, you will be left with decent converting traffic at the end of this exercise.
PPC traffic in my opinion is still the best converting traffic because it allows you to screen your prospects with your ads before they click and you are charged a click cost.
Although PPV traffic is also very lucrative, it is now getting very competitive and profit margins are shrinking fast with PPV traffic sources.
If you want to build a thriving PPC to CPA business, never allow one PPC traffic source to be more than 25% of your traffic spend. Diversify your PPC sources so that when one source disappears, you still have at least 75% of your PPC traffic.
So in conclusion, PPC to CPA is very much alive with great potential, even if you don’t rely on Google Adwords for PPC traffic.
Cheers. Gauher
