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Hi Folks:
With the ongoing machinations over TQ Scoring and PPC providers, I get asked this all the time -- when will domain parking companies sidestep CPC providers and go straight to CPA, where click quality and higher revenues are all but guaranteed?
Here are three reasons why I think CPA is effective, but not quite a wholesale blanket replacement for CPC at this point:
1) Breadth of categories. CPA offerings are strongest in Education, Loans, Autos, Insurance, Mortgages/Real Estate, and some others, and to widely varying degrees. Beyond that, the CPC revenue rates are much better than CPA adoption rates in the tail categories and domains, at least for now.
2) Domain-level reporting There are plenty of nascient CPA companies out there, many with a different expertise and supply of advertisers (some specialize in education CPA, for example.) Not all of them we've tested had the capacity to report back on an hourly basis on the activity on a domain level that we'd require for ourselves and our users for real-time reporting. Early on, for example, we'd get daily reports in an e-mail, not a file for parsing. And sometimes they skipped a day. But they were wiling to pay the highest payouts to keep the business. They are getting better, though, in part due to what companies like ours are requesting, and we do have providers now that report on a daily basis in an automated fashion, but still not real-time.
3) Qualified leads OK here is a big rub. Most CPA agreements with major brand-name ad clients call for at least 30 and sometimes up to 60 days of leeway on their end for them to determine if you sent a qualified application worthy of being paid out. Credit Card applications, for example, require credit check approvals, etc. They usually do not take 30 days to reimburse, but even a two-week lag makes it difficult to report on and stomach -- especially at a time when daily real-time CPC revenue stats are the norm. In addition, some CPA forms that we tested were extremely onerous for the users for example, some credit card and loan advertisers often required users to enter their Soc Security number, which can contribute to a high abandonment rate, and loss of any click revenue. So it raises the question -- would domain owners used to daily revenue reports be willing to wait weeks to see if they made any money?
In addition, we've seen some parking companies toy with the idea of paying domain owners 25 cents, or a dollar or whatever, per click on a CPA ad. The positive is you get paid right away. The negative, of course, is that the company could be making upwards of $40 if that CPA form is successfully returned. That's flagrant abuse of the quality domain name owners (the one with a quality lead is out $40, while the ones without quality leads still get paid) and not something we'd entertain on our platforms at this time.
Regards, Bcarr
With the ongoing machinations over TQ Scoring and PPC providers, I get asked this all the time -- when will domain parking companies sidestep CPC providers and go straight to CPA, where click quality and higher revenues are all but guaranteed?
Here are three reasons why I think CPA is effective, but not quite a wholesale blanket replacement for CPC at this point:
1) Breadth of categories. CPA offerings are strongest in Education, Loans, Autos, Insurance, Mortgages/Real Estate, and some others, and to widely varying degrees. Beyond that, the CPC revenue rates are much better than CPA adoption rates in the tail categories and domains, at least for now.
2) Domain-level reporting There are plenty of nascient CPA companies out there, many with a different expertise and supply of advertisers (some specialize in education CPA, for example.) Not all of them we've tested had the capacity to report back on an hourly basis on the activity on a domain level that we'd require for ourselves and our users for real-time reporting. Early on, for example, we'd get daily reports in an e-mail, not a file for parsing. And sometimes they skipped a day. But they were wiling to pay the highest payouts to keep the business. They are getting better, though, in part due to what companies like ours are requesting, and we do have providers now that report on a daily basis in an automated fashion, but still not real-time.
3) Qualified leads OK here is a big rub. Most CPA agreements with major brand-name ad clients call for at least 30 and sometimes up to 60 days of leeway on their end for them to determine if you sent a qualified application worthy of being paid out. Credit Card applications, for example, require credit check approvals, etc. They usually do not take 30 days to reimburse, but even a two-week lag makes it difficult to report on and stomach -- especially at a time when daily real-time CPC revenue stats are the norm. In addition, some CPA forms that we tested were extremely onerous for the users for example, some credit card and loan advertisers often required users to enter their Soc Security number, which can contribute to a high abandonment rate, and loss of any click revenue. So it raises the question -- would domain owners used to daily revenue reports be willing to wait weeks to see if they made any money?
In addition, we've seen some parking companies toy with the idea of paying domain owners 25 cents, or a dollar or whatever, per click on a CPA ad. The positive is you get paid right away. The negative, of course, is that the company could be making upwards of $40 if that CPA form is successfully returned. That's flagrant abuse of the quality domain name owners (the one with a quality lead is out $40, while the ones without quality leads still get paid) and not something we'd entertain on our platforms at this time.
Regards, Bcarr
