According to the rumormill, Google Wallet is not only coming, but it will end the problem of click fraud for Google. Supposedly, a click-through would only result in payment once the user purchases something from the advertised site, using Google Wallet of course. Exit CPC, Enter CPA.
That would probably be great news for Adwords advertisers, but potentially bad news for Adsense publishers. Adsense would then simply be another affiliate program. Affiliate programs work well for some sites, but the whole appeal of Adsense (for me, at least) was that it could work well where affiliate programs did not.
We'll have to wait and see how this pans out, if the rumor is true.
Sounds to me like that would reduce revenues quite a bit.
And if the Adwords buyers aren’t advertising for sites that can process transactions online, are they just not able to participate? There’s a whole, big world outside of making small, 1-time purchases online – I hope they realize that beforehand. One advertiser that shows up on one of our sites w/ adsense sells items that cost up to $20,000. Pretty sure that would fall outside of what Google Wallet could handle….
But can you imagine the payout for a single one of those “actions”? 🙂
I agree that it would be crazy to completely go CPA, as that would leave out a lot of advertisers. More likely, it would be an option for those who wanted to participate.
Well, Google is apparently responding to some of the rumors. On their blog today, they say “Looking ahead, we want to continue building payment services that meet the needs of Google users and advertisers. We expect to add payment functionality to Google services where our users need a way to buy online. For us, it’s all about bringing our users a better online experience whether they’re searching or buying.” They, of course, don’t talke about this particular rumor directly, but obviously, they are getting closer to at least coming out with Google Wallet.
I would imagine a large portion of adwords would not work with this. Legal Terms, Medical Terms. Lots of people use adwords for non ecommerce types of things. Pay Pal has never worked much outside of eBay does google really think they can beat a name like Pay Pal. People do not want to sign up for a new account. They have credit card in hand and are ready to buy something. PPC is not dead by a long shot.