Is PPC to CPA Dead?

With the current changes in the PPC business, many CPA marketers are throwing in the towel assuming that sending pay per click (PPC) traffic to cost per action (CPA) offers is dead and not making money.

Google Adwords is the search engine leader with over 60% of the search market making it an obvious choice as a top PPC traffic resource.

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

And any of us doing CPA marketing understand that a vast mass of CPA offers being promoted are not really value adding.

These mass banning started after the FTC introduced their new policy in early December 2009, to target marketers who were practicing deceiving marketing (i.e. flogs and farticles).

Many marketers lost their complete CPA businesses when Google Adwords decided to disallow their accounts, but Google Adwords is not the only pay per click search engine in city.

Even though Google Adwords controls a lion’s share of the available pay per click traffic online, there are still lots of other sources of pay per click traffic that can be bought and in many cases, at a much lower cost.

The two other major players in the PPC game are Yahoo Search Marketing and Bing Adcenter.  Even though these two pay per click sources don’t practically have as much traffic as Google Adwords, in my knowledge they do have better conversions.  Since the competition is not as much you can also pay a lower cost per conversion vs. advertising on Google Adwords.

If you take Yahoo and MSN’s search level, they stand for about 30% of the searches done on the Internet.  This is still a great amount of traffic to profit from.  Yahoo and Bing are scheduling to merge their pay per click marketing platforms, which will give Google Adwords a difficult challenge.

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.

But the difficulty with the second tier search engines is that they receive their traffic from a number of traffic partner sites.  This can result in a large number of fake clicks from partner sources that are just out to steal click revenues.

These second tier search engines don’t have the sophisticated scam technology that Google Adwords has, so it is hard to decide what clicks are real and which are fraudulent when they charge your account.

The solution is to study how to pass traffic partner IDs from second tier search engines so that you can have these deceitful 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 last part of this exercise.

PPC traffic is still one of the best converting traffic as it allows you to screen your prospects with your ads before they click and you are charged a click cost.

Although PPV traffic is also very profitable, it is now getting very competitive and profit margins are shrinking fast with PPV traffic sources.

If you want to build a successful 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.