Is the end near for PPC?

[disruptive]

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/internet/0,71229-0.html

With rising fraud in google's model, is there going to be an about turn in this area? Could we see displacement of the PPC model with a hybrid model that takes into account actual sales and drive customer acq cost to a tangible amount of the actual revenue of the advertiser.

1. How will this impact the bidding process for keywords?
2. Will domainers suffer? Do we harvest traffic that is often of little value...people hitting a parking page and then simply clicking links without thinking. Which currently generates revenue for domainer but not sales for advert??
3. Will this bias the value of some domains? Will type-o's still hold the same appeal?
4. It has been reported that sites like plentyoffish.com can generate and have generated $1M in adsense revenue in 2 months. I wonder how much of this advertising spend actually yields any sales for the underlying businesses advertising...

I think that a sales based model or new google model is the way forward for the future. Advertisers will eventually get tired of the increasing level of click fraud and lack of sales and move on...

What if one can find information from 'your' website without actually visiting it? This leads to interesting possibilities and perhaps will increase the value of domains that are common keywords or brands or product identifiers....

Just thinking out aloud here...what do other people think?

 

[stender]

I think ppc is on the decline due to too much fraud. The company I work for have just stopped using it in favour of using affiliate marketing, and paying out for accounts opened and registrations rather than clicks.

 

[petergskipton]

similar

On one business I am involved with the clicks were £5.00 each. Our competitors were busy on these... we got so many clicks but no-one ever went past the home page. Not adsense fraud, but equivalent to your competitors phoning your freephone lines to block and run up costs.

One of our less successul 'parked page' experiments was on a loans page. We did a direct affiliate deal (put an application form on the page), got the page upto 4/5 place in page rankings, and our earnings went down a lot. Which meant that the people using the click through were getting poor value, but there was no "fraud" from us, but maybe their competitors were driving up eachothers costs.

Its very tempting when you see 3 competiors on your google ads, and you know if you click on each ad it will cost them a fiver. maybe they then run out of budget and your ad is higher. I wouldnt do it of course

That said the figure quoted of 14% click through fraud would seem quite acceptable to me in "business terms". 86% of my advertising budget resulting in interaction with a potential customer. That would be preety damn good. I used to work with a large telesales company (they sold cars), and they actually budgetted £5.00 to get a customer to phone in from a television campaign - which is similar to high pay for a click which shows how expensive it can be.