More Flexible (And Better Paying?) Cost Per Action Google Referrals
So it’s official, Google is finally launching its new referral system. It will be rolled out gradually to all AdSense publishers in the next few days. I can’t see the new referrals yet, I still have the old ones. So what I’m writing here is based on what Google is saying in the announcement and what’s in the AdSense help center.
Unlike ad units and link units, referrals are paid on a cost per action (CPA) basis instead of on a cost per click (CPC) basis. This is not new: you only got paid if someone actually signed up for AdSense, AdWords, or whatever other Google service/product was being referred. Now, however, Google has expanded the referrals to include third-party products and services from AdWords advertisers.
You can select advertisers based on categories and keywords. Each referral unit can rotate multiple offers and will show the best performing offers more frequently — it sounds like Google is applying the same algorithms it uses for deciding which ads to display on its search pages to referral units.
More on this once I’ve played with them a bit.
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Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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2 Responses to “More Flexible (And Better Paying?) Cost Per Action Google Referrals”
I’m still very disappointed that the brains at Google have shown a complete lack of creativity in simply assigning us affiliate tracking ID which can be placed into naturally-formatted links, instead of those lame banners and junky Java text links.
I realize they are scared of spam-monsters hijacking their products…but this is a little ridiculous.
It’s one of my biggest complaints about the referral program, and something I sent an email to Google about when they first introduced them. I wish they’d use a plain text link, but they said they weren’t planning on it anytime soon. Seems silly to me.