I’ve been patiently waiting for a while for Google to finally come out with CPA (Cost-Per-Aquisition — essentially, affiliate sales) AdWords for a while now. They’ve got it in beta testing but that doesn’t help me. The idea would be pay folks $10 or so for every copy of Bingo Card Creator their site *sells* as opposed to 10 cents every time someone clicks on over to me. The idea is that that this would reduce the incentive to use scummy tricks to incite clicks.
Anyhow, Google recently released a kinda-sorta CPA feature. They call it the Conversion Optimizer. In a nutshell, instead of setting a maximum Cost-Per-Click (CPC) bid, you set a CPA bid, and Google uses some black magic to decide what a click at a certain day, time, and website is likely to be worth to you, based on your campaign history. (You’ve got to have significant campaign history — 300 conversions in the last 30 days, which would imply you are also spending a chunk of change on Google. Given that I just got charged $200 on my card for AdWords ads and that my last charge was on, hmm, September 15th, I qualified pretty easily.)
So, being the absolute sucker for new technology that I am, I signed up my Content Network campaign for it. Over the last month my Content Network Campaign has had an average CPA of 41 cents. I’d like to get that back down to 30 cents, but for the moment for testing purposes I set my CPA bid to 35 cents.
I’ll keep you posted with how this is working out for me.
P.S. While $280 (and counting!) of advertising expenditure this month is giving me a bit of heartburn, on the plus side, I’ve just crested $1,000 in sales for the first time ever.
Much has been written about the dangers posed by click fraud on the Google advertising products, and how Google has taken steps to address the problem. Click fraud, however, is only one of the ways for webmasters to defraud advertisers of money. I will detail another way in this post. The technique is already widely known among webmasters who use AdSense (and, indeed, sometimes I wonder if Google doesn’t encourage it). If you’re spending money on the Content Network, you also need to understand it so that you can cut your losses when appropriate.
… Bingo Card Creator is finally getting its own blog. I have only had ninety minutes to work on porting the site’s template over to WordPress, so it isn’t quite ready for primetime yet. You can see what I have got if you go over to www.bingocardcreator.com and append “wordpress” as the directory name (I am not putting a direct link to that because that is not going to be the final name and I’m not quite ready for it to be seen by Google, and hence customers, yet).