Bigj77

I've been doing cpa for a while now and make a pretty decent income off of it. Recently I have been taking ppc more seriously. I have been using adwords and as I read the forum I see a lot of people have negative things to say about adwords to cpa and in a sense they are correct. Google is incredibly difficult when it comes to promoting cpa offers and here are a few reasons why:

*I called and specifically asked for help with a cpa campaign and these are the problems I ran into.

Problem #1 - I had the perfect landing page. I mean quality scores 8 and 9 out of 10. As far as the landing page goes it had no problems but the problem arose when I said my goal was to get cpa leads by providing quality information and specific instructions.

The problem was that Google has a specific rule about product redirection. That is if a person cannot get the product on the same domain they landed on then Google usually does not approve the landing page.
So to be clear if I did not offer an iPad 2 ( for example) on my landing page without the need to go away from my site, then it is against their TOS.

Solution #1
I could iframe the offer page. (Only do this for offers that are approved to be advertised through iframe) . This would allow customers to stay on the same domain while completing each step of the cpa offer.

Solution #2
I could remove all affiliate links and just provide quality information. Instead of saying sites like myaffiiatelink.com provide users with an iphone 4 for testing purposes. I could say certain sites exist that allow users to test iphones. You can Google them for more information. Sure this would absolutely kill conversions for the day but in Google's eyes your site is full of quality and this builds a better long term relationship with adwords.

Solution #3
I did not bring this up but there is the option to mask affiliate links of simply put banners on the site. You are not trying to convince the user to go to a seperate site and google would be fine with that.

Problem#2
The rep on the phone went through the stages of my cpa offer and brought up some similar issues with the actual cpa offer page. ( This applies mostly for email submits in which a user must fill out a series of offers at each level. 2 surveys at level 1. 2 more at level 2. 2 more at level 3. and finally 2 more at level 4. So 8 surveys in all. ) He said that the user would most likely be frustrated by the amount of redirection that happens after the initial email submit. You can see where this is going so I'll skip to the solutions.

Solution #1
He suggested that I be very transparent with the offer. This means that I list out each step. Meaning Step 1. Submit your email. Step 2. submit blah blah. Step 3. You need to fill out this many surveys.
So transparent. There are some really good wordpress themes and plugins that allow you to list steps and accompany them with a picture. ( I have seen some very good uses of this to promote the cpa offer.
Although that might seem like extra work the quality traffic improves greatly as the user gets to see what is coming to them and olny users that want to go through it click through your cpa link.

Solution#2
This is a easier version of Solution#1. On the cpa landing page there are usually links to their privacy policies and other instructions and warnings. Simply add this to your landing page to improve your google ad score.

This is just a short summary of some of the lesser known things when advertising CPA with Adwords.

Hope this helps some people and success to you all

prabhatcourt

so big post please summarise it

hinadeane

Thank you for clarifying, it will surely help a lot of people who want to work from adwords to CPA.

Maraun

Seriously?

mtmjohn

You make it definitely clear. Good stuff, thanks for sharing!

Somali

Thank you for giving us the tips/solutions on those problems.

Omid

Thanks for clarification!

~ Omid

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>>The Ideas and Strategies That I Use to Make Money<<

anton433

Thanks for great info! I just recently started learning PPC with adCenter and if I find something that really works I'm going to try Adwords too. I have heard that you have to be very careful with Adwords when advertising affiliate products, so it's great that people share their experiences and lessons learned.

PPC-Coach

Their reps will say a lot of stuff. Then your account gets banned and that rep no longer works there. I've seen it happen.

52.ct

So an Amazon review site, with affiliate links to Amazon products would be out of the question to use with Google Adwords?

Do these same rules apply to content network?

Lastly, building a list be a 4th solution to problem 1?

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realtimeprospecting

One of the biggest problems with adwords it that they are trying to weed out affiliate marketing from their ad network. If your ad gets disapproved a couple of times they bans your account, its just way too many problems to swallow, its best to find other means of getting traffic. You'll get less problems with Yahoo, and that's crucial.

PPC-Coach

IF you want to work with adwords, give them exactly what they want or don't bother wasting your time with them.