Dirt cheap traffic from Google PPA

As CPA affiliates, we often have to absorb the costs for wasted clicks of tons of traffic that we drive to advertisers sites. If fact the majority of traffic that we pay to send to an advertisers site doesn’t not convert for the specific action that we are contracted to be paid for. Of course, they are still getting the benefit of that traffic. It may convert for something else on their site, or after the cookie has expired. Even if the customer we sent doesn’t take an action, the advertiser still gets to build their brand and gain visitors. It’s kind of the forgotten element of the CPA model.

Well here’s an example of just how good it can be on the other side of the equation. We have had a PPA (Pay Per Action) campaign set up on Google for a while now, sending traffic to a customer site that we are managing in the Aviation market. (See our visual guide of setting up a PPA campaign) . This PPA campaign is mostly for testing purposes, and not our main driver of traffic at all. So anything we get from it is basically a bonus. As you can see from the screenshot below, it does not convert very well at all for the action that we have set up. However, the traffic does end up staying on the site and looking around, which is great.

For the 1,499 click of Google traffic, we have paid a whopping $9.00. That breaks out to a CPC of $ 0.0060 per click! Now do I feel guilty about all the Adsense advertisers on the content network sending me this traffic and for essentially free? Not at all! I am on that losing side of the equation most of the time, so it’s nice to be the one on the receiving side.

I’m sure all the savvy readers of this blog can think of some very “grayhat” ways to exploit this kind of thing. That’s not how we roll at CDF Networks, but rest assured we have thought of them too.