Nada Collar

Since I wrote my thoughts on Google’s Pay-Per-Action I’ve been trying to think of some PPA ideas outside the box and have come up with a few. But the most interesting thought I’ve had is using PPA/CPA in place of CPC. What if I can determine if a reader came to my site via a PPA link? (I must be able to otherwise how would PPA work). I could make that my action. Sounds stupid since its just CPC. But what could I do with that added control?

• I can know at any second EXACTLY how much money I have spent.
• I could try and filter what I believe to be click fraud. It might affect my ranking, but I can weigh the pro’s and con’s and find a balance. At least my money is going to those who deserve it.
• I could pay for traffic that actually wants my site (ie by waiting for 3 internal page views, or something similar) . That way I can control the relevance of traffic I am paying for.
• I could dynamically adjust how often I notify Google to keep my ranking exactly where I want it. That way I only pay what I absolutely have to pay. Why get top ranking if 4th or 5th is better (and where I want to be).
• I could only notify Google if my visitor clicks on an Ad (makes aggregation a sure thing doesn’t it)

Some of these sound great and… well those last few just open up a can of worms now don’t they? I don’t want to even think about what I could do if I wanted to push the ethical bounds even further.

update: I already mentioned this in my first post, but it seems to be a common misunderstanding around the blogosphere, so let me address “basic” action fraud as Michael Arrington did. Google ranks ads by how much money it makes them, so CPC and PPA can exist together and Google can still decide which one makes them more money. So, if I don’t tell Google about the actions with the hope that I can get free advertising, then it’s the same thing as having a 0% click through ration (CTR). That will never get you any traffic. I am trying to point out that you can now control that click through ratio.

Right now I can see five solutions for these last problems:

• PPA never makes it to search. Probably not something Google would prefer.
• A publisher has direct control over what ads run. Seems like they already do, but its not a great solution from Google’s perspective as its not the most efficient. (and its just not the Google “algorithmic” way of doing things)
• Two tiers of affiliates, those that must use a Google supplied action page, and those that are big enough to trust that can supply their own actions. Ouch.
• Strong filtering of PPA landing pages to try and remove any unwanted activity.
• Hope that the positives outweigh the negatives and live with it.

None of them are great, and I think the last two are what we are going to get. It seems to me that Google might have a product that is much less scalable than Adwords. Of course Adwords has click fraud but yet it has been a phenomenal success, so maybe we will just have to live with PPA schemes.

Looks like an opportunity to me.