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The Death of Google Adsense And Other Myths
By Titus Hoskins (c) 2006
Recent changes in
the Google Adsense program has many
online website owners and marketers seriously concerned.
Many have seen their Adsense profits and income flatline...
seen their four or five
figure monthly Adsense income
disappear overnight. For many the Google Adsense bubble has
burst.
What happened?
First, Google made a change in its Adsense program, letting
advertisers choose between putting their ads in the search
results or on the content pages of
Adsense publishers.
Search won out and started to receive the higher bids.
Search results convert better than content ads.
Next, Google has cracked down on Junk Adsense sites,
like
they should. These sites consisted mainly of software
generated re-hashed search engine links and were totally
annoying to say the least. But Google also cracked down on
'squeeze pages' or 'affiliate landing pages' - a lucrative
source of income for many online marketers, mainly because
these pages helped marketers build an opt-in list or use
permission based email.
The results of these changes produced an Adsense meltdown
for many online marketers.
Some Internet marketers are speculating recent changes
could
even mean the death of Adsense. One online marketer,
Scott Boulch even published a free report entitled 'The
Death of Adsense".
Many affiliate marketers would agree with Boulch
on some of
his points, especially the obvious fact that using Adsense
on your web content is starting on the bottom rung of the
online marketing ladder. Instead of receiving pennies
per
click with Adsense, alert marketers and webmasters have
already discovered that by using CPA (Cost-Per-Action) and
direct affiliate links, they can produce significantly more
revenue from their web pages. Why earn pennies per click
when you can earn $5, $10 or OVER $100 per click?
But the fine people at Google are catching on...
In the past Google has made its own swing to the
Cost-Per-Action direction with its referral system for the
Firefox Browser
and giving webmasters credit for signing up
Adwords and Adsense accounts.
Many online marketers believe Google needs to expand on
these baby steps and open their Adsense
affiliate program
up to third party products/advertisers. In a recent company
statement Google offered some hope: "We're always looking
for new ways to provide effective and useful
features to
advertisers, publishers, and users," the company stated "As
part of these efforts we are currently testing a
cost-per-action (CPA) pricing model to give advertisers
more flexibility and provide publishers another way to earn
revenue through AdSense." Basically, in cost-per-action,
advertisers pay for leads, purchases or customer
acquisition. It would help with the click fraud issue and
the monetary returns could potentially make Adsense's
revenues pale in comparison.
As more and more commerce goes
online... acquiring
customers for such diverse services as insurance, real
estate, telephone, marketing, web hosting, travel, mortgage
loans, cable TV, banking... you name it,
almost any service
or product sold in the marketplace is now turning to the
Internet for customers and lifelong clients.
Enormous sums of money will change hands. Perhaps, the
most
lucrative of these is customer acquisition. Advertisers are
turning to the Internet and webmasters/marketers for
acquiring these lifelong customers for their respective
services and products. Businesses and companies are quickly
realizing paying an attractive lead generating
fee/commission is smart business. They quickly build a
client base for
their services or products and quickly
recoup their expenses - realizing in the long run these
leads will generate huge profits.
It can also mean huge profits for the CPA
networks like
ValueClick's Commission Junction and Rakuten's LinkShare
who supply the advertisers with publishers and website
marketers to harvest these leads. It can be a lucrative
venture for all involved, especially for those online
marketers who have cornered the search engines for
lucrative niche markets in big ticket items. Even small
ticket items pay
quite well for those marketers who know
how to market online.
Contextual advertising is fine, but CPA (Cost-Per-Action)
will offer much better returns for the website owner.
Making any profitable site much more profitable. It will
and is opening up a whole area of marketing opportunities
that never existed before we had the Internet. Creating a
complex
structure of advertisers, publishers and the
Affiliate/CPA companies that connect the two.
Of course, cutting out the middle man has always been even
a more profitable venture
for most marketers. As more and
more webmasters realize they can make much more with
dealing directly with companies, rather than going through
a middle process like Google Adsense
or the countless other
affiliate/CPA networks ... online marketers can reap even
bigger rewards.
For an online marketer when you get a phone call or email
from the CEO or the
affiliate manager with a company or
service you're promoting with your website - you know you
have made it! Dealing directly with a company usually means
bigger commissions and
special exclusive deals just for you
or your sites.
Only fly in the ointment, all that extra paperwork and
business wheeling and dealing. Many marketers and website
owners
like the idea of someone else handling all the
tracking, collecting payments, promotional materials...
they just like to sit back and build more websites and
content. It gives the
affiliate marketer a lifestyle that
they are looking for on the web. They just like to market
and promote with their sites and let someone else worry
about the details. Therefore,
there will always be a place
for contextual ads like Google Adsense... "Rumors of my
demise have been greatly exaggerated."
However, could CPA be a better alternative for the current
Adsense contextual ads?
Google would be the natural choice for a middleman if there
ever was one. Besides, many
savvy marketers know the Google
brand name is trusted online, any product/service promoted
through Google would be an easy sell. Many argue Google
already dominates the web, why
should it not be the one to
handle these CPA transactions through its Adsense program.
On the flip side, over countless updates and changes to its
indexing, many webmasters have
experienced more than a few
negative dealings with Google. Many have won, many have
lost in this Google Age, but all have realized riding the
Google Search Engine is like running
with the bulls at
Pamplona, totally thrilling unless you're one of the
unfortunate few who get trampled in the process.
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