Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

I just read this Wired article about click fraud...a decent overview of the click fraud problem, but what the heck do splogs have to do with it? Yeah, they're spammy, but the clicks on the adsense links on splogs are typically genuine users, so it's a different issue entirely.

The article's author, Charles Mann, quotes Bill Gross as saying that CPA will overtake CPC as the advertising scheme of choice. Of course Gross says that, since his new little baby, Snap is based on CPA (cost per action) advertising. But, I think it's much more likely that Google and Yahoo will eliminate their affiliate programs before they switched to a purely CPA model. The reason is simple, they have way too many advertisers with a crappy conversion rate that continue to pay out the ear for clicks. They'd never make anywhere near as much on a pure CPA basis. Besides, clicks are easier to track and verify (for the search engines, that is) than orders or leads.

I doubt we'll see either of those things happening anytime soon unless the number and scope of complaints about the quality of traffic begins to exceed the amount of money the search engines are making from spammy affiliates and click fraud. If they got rid of their affiliate programs, they would eliminate nearly all click fraud, but they would also decrease their click volume by probably 1/3...not likely to happen.