In this article on Seeking Alpha, it is revealed that Google is beginning to trial CPA ads (cost-per-action, otherwise known as affiliate marketing ads) on their network.
At present, they have a beta programme underway. To use it, you have to be invited to participate. You will get greater flexibility to recommend the products than you currently have with AdSense ads, although “click here” will still be forbidden.
The author of the Seeking Alpha article claims that this spells the end of ValueClick’s Commission Junction network. It’s possible that in the long term, advertisers will prefer to move their business towards Google, but this remains to be seen, and my feeling is that it is far too early in the game to make such a prediction. I suspect that Commission Junction will be with us for years to come, as will a lot of smaller affiliate networks. There is a considerable investment of time and, in some cases, money required to move an affiliate programme; it’s not a decision that any merchant will take lightly. Links are often broken in the process, causing extra work for publishers and a corresponding loss of revenue. A lot depends on Google’s offer to merchants, also. If Google want a bigger piece of the pie than Commission Junction, they’ll have to prove that they are worth it by supplying more traffic.
It will be interesting to see what Google’s new CPA ad units will look like. I suspect they will not allow as much flexibility as most affiliate networks; you may not be able to define your own anchor content, and the ads may, like current AdSense ads, come in blocks that are fixed in size. CJ is also moving towards a lower-flexibility model with their new Javascript links, due to launch tomorrow; publishers will not be able to choose their own content for these links as they can with current links, dubbed as “legacy” links by CJ. However, I suspect they will still offer greater flexibility than Google, at least in the short term.
David Thomas, The Affiliate Marketer
I cannot run adwords on my site and most likely will not be able to run the new CPA ad units either as they may be seen by residents of certain US states which prohibit advertising promoting gambling – my affiliate programs via CJ do very nicely thankyou
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Thank you for your comment, Jen, and I hope you do very well with CJ. I imagine that you are quite correct in your assumption that Google will not allow advertising promoting gambling to be done using AdWords with CPA ads.
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