Dan London of Vibrant Orange SEM and the AdWords Editor Blog has posted a recap of his experience with the AdWords Pay-Per-Action, where advertisers only pay Google a CPA (cost per action) for a conversion.
A conversion for the site I am managing is a sign-up, and we generally use $15 as a good cost per conversion. When I first started the PPA beta, I put the amount I was willing to pay way below that amount.
Once I bumped up the amount I would be willing to pay up to $10, I started getting more and more conversions. I am willing to pay that much a CPC, since it is still well below my target cost.
I couldn’t be happier with how it is working. In fact, I have increased my daily budget for the PPA to pretty much run wide open.
I think that we will see more people cut off content network and site targeted campaigns and simply push PPA campaigns once it comes out of beta. I can control my cost per conversion and people are motivated to place my ads in good spots on their websites.
Dan also quotes that Google Pay-Per-Action is sending them a 21% conversion rate :
- Cost:$720
- Clicks:337
- Impressions:371,000
- Conversions:73
- Conversion Rate:21%
How has your experience been with Google Pay-Per-Action? Are you seeing similar results as Dan?
Vote for this post : 0
or Buzz it at Yahoo :
Comments
10 responses so far ↓
evolve on Aug 7, 2007 at 10:06 am
I’ve had some pretty poor luck with PPA campaigns ranging from $2 CPA to $70 CPA. Initially (mid april) we had little to no traffic and no conversions to mention. All of a sudden around July 4th we had a blast of conversions, most of which we identified as fraudulent using our own server side software. Most conversions generated were on low traffic, low quality websites. Additionally the conversions generated were sometimes from similar IP addresses, and often times contained “bad” information.
Since then I’ve paused all PPA campaigns, and have been in the talks with google’s PPA team in order to find out what the issue may be. They informed me that they had no record of “fraudulent” conversions and assured me that they used the latest technology to maintain quality conversions from PPA.
If you’re worried about the quality of your conversions from PPA you may submit a “click quality” form as found in the google help center. You will need to specify as much info as you can about both your PPA campaigns and conversions in order to be considered for any type of refund on the program.
Hope this info is helpful!
Dan on Aug 7, 2007 at 10:33 am
All-Time I am getting a 13% conversion rate..and in the past week it has been about 23%. As an AdSense user, I like these better than just putting content boxes on my sites.
Ken Savage on Aug 7, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Nice work Dan. Congrats on your success.
Is this for your own site or for a client?
how did you come up with $15 per signup as your conversion cost?
Dan on Aug 7, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Client.
The CPC is what we determined by the “financial” guys as to what a sign-up was valued for us.
I just pushed the daily budget up higher, as I have been getting a 20% conversion rate.
Loren Baker, Editor on Aug 7, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Dan, have you tried the CPA option & targeting with Yahoo Search Marketing (which still charges CPC, but targets and optimizes with a CPA goal)? If so, how does it compare to Google?
Dave on Aug 7, 2007 at 1:42 pm
PPA is nice, but Google then knows your converision, CPL/CPS, etc. Not good.
Dan on Aug 7, 2007 at 1:54 pm
The conversion optimizer beta asks for that as well. I tried that. It never could get the CPC even close to what I wanted.
Dan on Aug 7, 2007 at 2:04 pm
I haven’t tried the Yahoo! version.
Bashar on Aug 8, 2007 at 1:42 am
I haven’t used CPA as advertiser yet but I’m planning to. However as publisher I did not see high conversion ratio.
I like however how I can target and select my Ads. I can make sure it’s related.
Christopher Rees on Aug 12, 2007 at 11:33 pm
How many conversions were you seeing a day (roughly) for Google to accept you as a beta? We wanted to jump on it, but the minimum conversions they were looking for (for current CPC) customers were pretty high…
So it looks like (a lot of us) will have to wait for it to come out of beta. I love the idea though.
Thanks for the input!
Christopher Rees
www.palaestratraining.com
Leave a Comment