What is Digg?74 Comments
- 1DNA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+30cj = commission junction
dt = direct track
vc = value click
ppc = pay per click AKA cpc =cost per click
cpm = cost per thousand views
cpa = cost per action (lead form)
cps = cost per sale
cpp = cost plus performance (cpa/cps+cpm/ppc) - craigm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+23I predicted this back in February and linked to it from a digg post:
http://digg.com/technology/Google_To_Open_Affiliate_Network
Look at the comments for a laugh... "This will never happen". Oops - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I love the Adsense ads that appear on this page.
"AdSense Ready Web Sites"
Make money with AdSense Over 300 websites available!
"AdSense Ready Web Sites"
150 Content Rich Web Sites, Instant Download & Easy Setup
Exactly the reason why advertisers opt out of the "content" CPC network. - valour, on 10/12/2007, -2/+13Very true -- I've tried those services, and had clicks go through that I KNEW were sales (because the person who clicked the links and bought the services told me) and I was never paid for them through CJ.
But there is another issue here -- Google AdSense pays out a little less every month. I've been doing it for three years, and although traffic to my sites has increased exponentially, Google income has perhaps only doubled.
Recently I switched to the beta of Yahoo's new Publisher Network, and got the same kind of ads (same colors and everything) that AdSense had on my site, except Yahoo is paying out 3-5 times more than AdSense was. Part of that is the fact that Yahoo allows you to target your ads, whereas AdSense wants to make those decisions for you (and no matter what, I can't get rid of those 'let us write your ***** college term paper' AdSense ads!). So far, so good. In the first week since I switched to YPN, I've made more than I did in all of last month with AdSense. So maybe AdSense is dead anyway, and Google needs something newer and better targeted. Unless the referrals/sales pay out big, it won't be worth it, though. And the click tracking must be foolproof. - vermin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10Ok, someone want to explain all the affiliate jargon? What do those acronyms stand for?
- TubaTechno, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8So if Google puts this in beta...does that mean its finished?
- 1DNA, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9Ahh affiliate marketing, by chumps for chumps. Granted their are some people making a disgusting amount of money from CJ, DT and VC and they are CJ, DT, and VC.
- Kamino, on 10/12/2007, -3/+8tritium: You're the man now dog.
- TravisS, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I can't see this working too great. I think webmasters will make a lot less this way.
- Sheaf, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4If you don't know how massive this is in the tech world, you really need to look at Google and Yahoo's latest revenue numbers.
- bugninja, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4You'll have to sell through the gbuy service. You can use the affiliate program, but all purchases MUST be accounted for under their new payment system as well. Just a hunch.
- joehobbes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I'm pretty sure Google will have a script or something to record the transaction -- I really doubt they would leave it to the merchant to report the transaction
- roadies, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3funny thing is that diggers always complain about ads. So much so that they hate them. But seems everyone in this thread has a site with ads on them. Maybe diggers are just complaining about getting significantly less money each month than some of the sites they visit that have ads.
- 1DNA, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Actually just like how everyone else does it, implementing a cookie is the least of googles concerns here. Actually with all the commotion over at CJ this is prime time for a new giant in the business.
- SlackerCSB, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5@ vermin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affiliate_marketing - verm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2By charging for conversions instead of clicks, a firm isn't necessarily rewarding an advertiser for lots of traffic. Webmasters (and similar) are now going to be paid based on conversions (user clicks on ad, user goes to new site, user purchases product or service). In effect, this is going to force ads to be more relevant and pitch more compelling offers rather than just a "hey click here!" link. In the end, the consumer may actually win because there will be less ads thrown at them. Hopefully this could lead to better targeting, better promotions, and a lot less garbage ads.
- Permanent4, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I won't sit here and tell anyone that I'm making anywhere near a killing with Linkshare, but people ARE buying iTunes downloads from indie bands through my music podcast's web site, and while I have issues with the DRM, it's still a decent deal for myself and for the bands whose music people are buying. I'll keep doing it until something better comes along, too. (I'm waiting for YOU, Podsafe Music Network people...)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2>>Will google track if someone comes back to the site and buys it later?
Why wouldn't they cookie the user like every other affiliate network? Most give you 30 to 120 days for a purchase to happen.
>>Exactly how is this going to prevent the merchant from cheating?
Google's vision involves GBuy and controlling the entire transaction. Otherwise, yes, it is up to trust. If you find a merchant doesn't convert, you dump them and find another. You'll be able to do the same thing with Google now -- choose which merchants and which offers to promote. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Excellent prediction; I'm linking to your post from mine. You were right on about the click fraud causing them to look at options that are more resistant to thieves.
There is the issue of employees to handle this and their payment processor GBuy; right now, Adsense is fairly hands-off, requiring little human intervention. I've never had to contact an Adsense support specialist, which I guess speaks to the fact of how simple it is to use their programs, but they will be going head first against some very established companies (VC/CJ and then eBay/Paypal). - Wojjie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2So instead of worrying about click fraud, they will have to worry about advertiser fraud which would probably entail a more complex investigation.
I think the most fair type of advertising is CPM based (with a little of what Google is trying) over all others. If you think about it, it can turn out to be the most neutral approach in a way.
With CPM, advertisers bid over inventory space on a site, the more effective a site is, the more they will be bidding. The advertisers with the most effective ad and site will have the highest turn over rate, which in turn allows them to bid higher, and will force the other advertisers to optimize theirs or fall behind.
Then there is no need to track click fraud, since it does not matter, just track conversions from a site for benchmarking purposes. Then you can roll all this into a system, where advertisers can pick publishers based on their benchmarks and bid for inventory space on that site.
Advertisers that falsely report benchmarks of a publisher will be easily found, since if the advertiser bids low, other advertisers might decide to try it out and find it fruitful and start a bidding war back up to the 'real' value. If the advertiser bids high, and reports a poor performance, yet still tries to buy all stock, then people will easily see that they are being fishy. Or perhaps set rules into play that would still deliver lower bids even though the highest bidder is attempting to buy all stock, then the lower advertisers will be able to test the waters and see the benchmarks are false.
I think a system like this would be the most fool proof, and not require the advertising network to be too heavily weaved into the advertiser's site, other than providing them tools to track performance. - 1DNA, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Granted some of the datafeed programs offered by Affiliate Programs are great, in fact DT nailed that one when they put out datafeeds. However you will still find that in order to get into the decent comparison engines its all PPC.
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Valueclick / fastclick actually takes some ads based on CPA, and convert that to a variable CPM or CPC for the publisher. It's amazing how much they put in their prospectus.
- neave, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2You're totally right - YPN needs to accept customers outside the US sharpish to compete with AdSense.
- FishyJoe, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Exactly how is this going to prevent the merchant from cheating?
What prevents the merchant from non-reporting sales and leads to Google, thus receiving free advertising? - kenstone, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Merchants who advertise on Adwords/Adsense currently have a little piece of javascript they can put on their sale completion page that talks back to Google to tell them a transaction was completed. This system is how merchants are able to track the effectiveness of their advertising dollars.
- MihaiM, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If they do this I'm in big trouble because I basically live from AdSense and I can't switch to Yahoo! Ads because I live in Europe.
- isulongseoph, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1CPA is way way harder to get than CPC. It will only benefit the bigger publishers.
- pinetree, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1If advertisers think bogus clicks are annoying, wait until they start getting bogus leads. Yes, there really are jerks out there that that will type bogus phone numbers and email addresses into your form just to scam $1 in affiliate payments. You'll lose more in wasted time responding to bad leads than you lost in money to bad clicks.
- yakito, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I see this as a big move for google. Taking into account that 99% of their money come from advertising making drastic changes to the only thing that makes money may be a little dangerous.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1they may require use of google analytics goal tracking, along with some extra contractual stuff about not cheating.
- Llan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Do you have a point?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You have to realize what you can make for a good sale or lead the affiliate way. For one merchant, I sell software -- they do the national TV advertising, I get the search engine/PPC rankings. If the customer buys through me, I make 20%. I had an order yesterday for over $750 of software.. nice deal!
Now we don't know exactly how Google will structure the commission, but you won't be earning 10 cents a click when you get paid per sale or lead. It will be interesting to see how transparent they are with the commission structures since that is something they are so secretive about with AdSense. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1With verified leads, it must go through the merchant's hands before you get a commission, but with sales, the reporting is automated with the merchant's cart. When the final page of the merchant's cart is reached, the affiliate network's servers are notified and the sale is recorded automatically.
There is always a danger that a merchant will screw with their cart -- leaks like 1-800 or live chats where the customer can order offline even though you sent the click, etc. So there is always an element of trust involved with affiliate sales. If the merchant doesn't convert for you or seems to be ripping you off, find another. Maybe Google will be able to bring some integrity to the industry in regards to transparency of reporting. - Djerrid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1How to game *that* system:
1) Bait and switch: Have the product you are advertising be a very expensive and almost no one will buy it. Fill the rest of the page with links to similar/cheaper products on your other web pages.
2) This one works for products that you wouldn't buy on the web like Coke, McDonald's. Buy all of the Ad Net words you can and link them to your merchandising store that also displays a large and impressive flash ad. Almost no one will buy the crappy Coke branded key chain, but a good chunk of the web will have "Drink Coke!" on the side bar. (Come to think of it, they could do this now with ad sense. Wonder why they don't.) - adamlazz, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1PANSIES!!!
In my opinion, this is just Google being too shy to give their users some profit. I think it is very unrealistic that mass amounts of people will sign up to whatever Google makes them sign up for, rendering this service useless.
If Google could release a new service that is as widely used as the current pay per click or pay for impression AdSense, then THAT is something that web site authors would buy into.
But, in the past, what have we learned from Google? In one or two instances, Google has showed us how a simple, but slightly farfetched idea can turn into something brilliant. - mntpng, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Google doesn't have much choice at this point. With massive click fraud bots on the horizon, Google has to come up with a better advertisement model. Doing nothing is more risky than doing something about it.
- raingrove, on 10/12/2007, -3/+4Google accused me of click fraud and subsequently I was banned from the Adsense program. So will that prevent me from joining this new service? Oh wait.... I think I will pass... Come on, Yahoo!
- chengfu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I can't imagine Google running a succesful affiliate network. Other than with CPC advertising they will need an awful lot of support people to implement tracking with the merchants and constantly check if the tracking is still ok. Until now Google has only released services that don't need much human service from their side.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I found a story on the Chicago Tribune, is that good enough? The story came out yesterday...
http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-060621google-story,1,2530787.story?coll=chi-business-hed - MacGyver, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Valueclick actually pays pretty well. They pay for a combination of CPM and CPC, I was making much more with them than with google's adsense that only pays CPC.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The reason why automatic content targetting will be out the door is it doesn't work as well as publishers and advertisers seeing eachother 100%. You can rank sites by conversion rate or a figure that encompasses conversion rate, some might call it ecpm. But you'll end up giving out 90% of the impressions for a campaign to sites which won't convert a sale. For the optimistically over-realistic 10% that convert, they'll be happy but you've just pissed off 90% of your publishers. See where this is going?
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1The main way they will do this is by not showing ads that are not performing well. If your ad isn't generating enough sales, it won't get shown much. It's the same method they use for ranking poorly targeted or worded ads, and the same way they find click fraud.
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I don't see why their content targetting will be out the door. They already track conversions on some advertisers and I believe they are already ranking ads based on conversions. The math on ranking and relevant ads should not need to change from CPM to CPC to CPA.
- EnviroChem, on 05/22/2009, -0/+1I suspect (but don't yet know for sure) that Google will provide webmasters with the ability to see the eCPM (estimated revenue per thousand impressions) of a CPA ad on a channel per channel basis just like we can with their normal PPC ads. This means that CPA ads that do not have a reasonable eCPM will get abandoned by AdSense publishers and Google them self very quickly. In order to succeed in the Google system, a CPA advertiser's ads will have to perform well just like the PPC ads do.
- dognose, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I think that webmasters who rely on fake or contrived clicks will suffer. those with quality traffic can do better once the network fills up.
- geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1dunno why someone dugg you down. CPM makes sense as you said, you have inventory. Your impression can be used for one of many campaigns, some of them action based, others CPC based. It makes sense for publishers to see CPM. Advertisers like CPA but it's not very realistic, the method you propose is very valid and in use today by others. It just makes sense. But don't discount what google is doing, if they give better commissions if the advertiser uses GBuy, or if they let publishers know which advertisers use GBuy, then they get more advertisers to use Gbuy.. and they can track fraud with GBuy, period. This won't work with leads of course. So there's a market for what google is doing.
The CPM market you talk about is not so niche and encompases everything. It stands the test of time, it will always work, it's a happy marriage between publishers and advertisers. Also with CPM payout, good luck defrauding that. Hint: at $.50 CPM, to make a dollar you'll need 2,000 impressions. By the time you have some bot /guy in india refresh a page 1,000 times you know it's fraud. CPC is easy to defraud, a few clicks and you're golden, CPM is tougher. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1You don't need to worry about the Dells. They may use paypal but they won't commit fraud. You need to worry about the small time advertisers, fly by nighters who will rip you off. Publishers will be able to see new advertisers and see if they use GBuy, if the advertiser doesn't use GBuy then the publisher can opt to use that advertiser knowing the risks involved. Of course over time publishers will realize that it's in their best interest to select GBuy advertisers for the new advertisers, otherwise, for the bigger advertisers, they won't need to worry.
IMO Google will move from this to something like yahoo! stores. Already yahoo! stores has a partnership with CJ. This is forcing a bunch of players out there to merge, CJ/VC, linkshare, etc, can no longer just sit on their butts. - geronimo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1In thinking about this, google with GBuy can offer an attractive solution. That is their only competitive advantage here. There will be no cheating if the purchases are done with GBuy. In fact this may result in CJ/VC and Ebay merging. They currently work very very closely together.
- gd007, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1best way to make money from website is to charge user.
- screampants, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1As far as affiliate stuff goes. I've used Clickbank before. I think that have basically been following this type of reward based system for years.
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