After this recent 90 mil click fraud settlement... new landing page crawling... and the new modified terms... I think google is tired of hearing click fraud complaints and lack of conversions from customers.. All advertisers at the end of the day want are results ( leads sales etc) Google since they started adwords / PPC model probably just thought "we give them traffic, we get paid, come again soon ".... However, it seems that after all these click fraud complaints, the billions Google is charging its advertisers is starting to be not proportional to the amount of success its advertisers are having with their program.. As bid prices and compeition rise for paid search more and more advertisers are noticing their ROI / conversions going down .. in order to keep their shareholders happy, avoid advertisers going elsewhere, Google needs to add more value ... I think Google is trying to gain more control of both sides of the spectrum ..phase 1 enforce relevant ad's/traffic via the quality score algo and now phase 2 rewarding advertisers that have converting landing pages .. I think the next phase will be CPA. I mean why else would they start monitoring landing pages all the sudden?? Lets say my entire landing page was a big image map that says "Buy Widgets for 29.95 bla bla bla" and has a 50% conversion rate? How could Google judge the quality of a landing page if there is no true text content on it and the image map converts 50% itself? The changes google are making and the new clauses they are adding to their Adwords TOS makes me think big G is moving full steam ahead to a CPA model... give Google 1 year or less and I bet we will see CPA As an Adwords buyer for the past few years click fraud has been big... I rarely even use the content network anymore for my clients.. And as far as adsense, I think the click fraud complaints may eventually force Google to re-evaluate the CPC model and move to CPA or at least offer both ... The click fraud issue i think is even expanding to the orangic search algo... Now its apparent more than ever that sites need authoritative links to get ranked/indexed because google wants to filter out all of those adsense spam sites that are generating junk traffic for its advertisers.. Even after the algo changes and attempts to improve click quality the PPC model just won't continue to work... just as many people planned CPA coming... I think its right around the corner... Seems like also this CPA program will tie in other services like the Gbuy service in the works.. (like what they did with Gmail/Google chat but for advertisers) I think GBuy may have something to do with a CPA program in the future if Google goes the CPA route.... give consumers the ability to buy from adwords advertisers .. Google would then take a cut of sale/transaction ( similiar to PayPals merchant comissions from sales but maybe at a larger level since Google would be also driving customers to the advertiser) See USPTO... Anyways just my thoughts... what do you guys think about the future of Google's Advertising products? How many think CPA is right around the corner for Google? Or is PPC here to stay (even with all the click fraud settlements etc goin on) ?
I think that they are just covering video ads and integration in other ways of mediums and formats like for example: - print ads - Radio stream ads.
Yea I think that's what the update to their TOS mainly was about (different ad formats).. regarding adding products and services... but that clause and other stuff they've added to the TOS and landing page crawling makes me think they are up to more ... Check these posts from threadwatch and DP.. I think others are starting to agree.. Adsense turning into CPA Google Crawling AdWords Landing Pages for Quality and this Google Adds Agency Clause to AdWords TOS Aaron also says..
Google added the crawling landing page feature recently for checking keywords destination page relevancy for quality score calculation. an example: if I have a web hosting business and I decide to capture more traffic (web design traffic) - if I have a "web design" keyword but my landing page do not has "web design" keyword (determined by Adword spider) this keyword will have a low quality score due the landing page is not relevant for this keyword so I may need to pay high bid values to activate it.
Does anyone ever object to that way of thinking? Google is once again rewarding keyword stuffers, but this time they're adding the human element. The question is whether the ad verifiers will catch these sites out and manually change the quality score (if that's even possible!). I foresee a lot of keyword stuffed AdWords sites in the future if this continues to hold a lot of weight. The next issue is, as dakman said, the big image map with $29 widgets... this page may convert absolutely well, the small-time advertisers and company may not know better but in the end they may get penalized in favor of the keyword stuffers. What about sites that may be highly relevant to many keywords but only feature a smattering of them on the actual content? Food for thought.
Really I don't think it makes sense for Google to crawl landing pages when that has nothing to do whether or not a page converts... Yes certain call to action text ... eg "Signup Now" "Buy it Now" may lead to more sales than a site with no clear call to action.. But detecting the call to action in all formats of media will be hard... Flash sites, Banners etc.. I mean even look at affiliate programs .. lets say an advertisers used affiliate banners on a page... the advertisers lets say gets 50% conversion rates from that banner ... I think its unfair for Google to judge whats a "quality landing page"... Instead if Google is concerned about conversions effecting the Quality score, it should use actually logged conversion rates from the google conversion tracker to judge what landing pages convert well and reward advertisers that have good landing page conversion stats.... This is why I think Google is going to add a CPA model (in addition to the PPC program) maybe 1 year 2 years from now... to motivate its advertisers to have better converting landing pages.... ultimately that is the real "quality score" of a successful adwords campaign ... If Google is going to judge a landing page by the cover, I think they may as well start a "landing page" creation service to help business owners create landing pages or create standardized landing page templates that advertisers can use and customize fields/prices etc... because I think many small business owners aren't educated as to how to design a quality landing page...
I agree (and I hope) that google will add some kind of cpa or affiliate system in 2 or 3 years but I don't think that these recent change in agreements has nothing to do with these changes. a crawling in landing page would not be enough to detected an action - a crawling in landing page is to collect keywords only. if they'll introduce CPA or affiliate system they will need a new clear agreements terms and scripts in a lead/sale page not in landing page.
They don't need a verifiers to catch stuffers - an old and simple algorithm may catch keywords stuffers: for each landing page is assigned a common power punctuation (100 points) and this power punctuation is distributed for each key keyword found on landing page: if you're very focused and crawler get only 5 keywords on your landing page - the matching keywords found on your campaign get a high relevance power punctuation of 20 (=100/5) points each for the quality score. But if you have too many keywords on landing page like 100, each keyword found by the crawler will have only 1 (=100/100) point hurting your quality score keyword matching on your campaign.
How would the financials work out for Google to maintain/grow current revenue? If someone is paying $0.50 per click and gets a !% conversion, they could go to $50 CPA but at least for small to medium size business that might be a difficult adjustment. I think it would also take away some of the revenue smoothness Google and publishers see. I wouldn't mind CPA from an advertisers perspective but from a publishers perspective it can be rather negative. It seems like the cheating would shift to the Adwords side: I could run a campaign to get visitors for free with an extremely low conversion product on the landing page, but Google could work that into a quality score too. I am OK with the current model as I don't deal in areas that are popular with fraud and watch things close enough to shut down content or search campaigns when they don't producre. Oh, and the credits I get from Adwords for click quality are nice too.
Very interesting article, Susan - thanks for posting. It sounds like this will work on the same principle as the current AdSense Link Units, but probably with a lot more flexibility. I'm not really familiar with CPA, and I have a question that you (or someone else) may be able to answer, related to this FAQ from the article: Here's my question: Who determines the "specified action" that results in payment - is it Google, the advertiser, the publisher, some combination, or another entity entirely? Thanks, Sam
The advertiser need to put a html code in the targeting page similar to a converting code - lets call it action code. To this program work all advertises has an statistic called EPC that is the history average earning per 100 clicks - it is the average of earning paid in commissions for the publishers for the number of clicks - commissions are paid when the user click and reach the the action code. If the advertiser put his action code on a unreachable page or this advertise has an product that is not interesting for who visits the page or if he pay a low commission he will have a low EPC compared to others. Probably Google will automatically select ad distribution frequency (traffic) based on EPC history (like does today with bid).
Thanks, Micromag, for the detailed explanation and answer. It sounds as if EPC provides a similar function for CPA to what Quality Score does for CPC. I'll probably play around with it a bit once it's released to "the masses". Sam
i think Google could have a very successful cpa program... but it would have to be significantly different than the cpa companies already out there to catch my eye b/c i doubt they'd pay as well
I am wondering... The recommended number of keywords in a meta description is 20 so I have been told. But 20 really makes you narrow it down. What if you have 100? So you have a hundred but your site is very relevant to the keywords. Is this a bad thing? By the way I have adsense on my site. But I don't use adwords anymore. Furthermore, I am wondering. How do you successfully optimize a website? There is too much wrong info online and I am trying to find someone to analyze my website and offer some tricks of the trade to help me place better. Any advice would rock!