Is PPC to CPA Dead?

The following blog post is a guest post by internet marketing expert Gauher Chaudhry.

With the recent banning of Google Adwords accounts, many CPA marketers are throwing in the towel assuming that sending pay per click (PPC) traffic to cost per action (CPA) offers is now dead.

Google Adwords has been cracking down on CPA and affiliate marketers and banning accounts that they feel do not offer a good user experience to their searchers.

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.

Now Google Adwords does control a lion's share of the available pay per click traffic online, but there are many other sources of pay per click traffic that can be bought and in most cases at a much lower cost.

The other two 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 search volume done on the Internet.  This is still a sizable amount of traffic to profit from.

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.

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 do not have the 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.

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.

*** About the Author ***

Gauher Chaudhry (@gauher) has been marketing online for the last 13 years and shares his PPC marketing insights at http://www.gauherchaudhry.com

Note: The author’s views are their own and may not reflect the views or opinions of Affilorama.