The already-happening yet next evolution of online marketing will be based on a hybrid CPA metric that backs out to a mutually acceptable CPC rate for both publisher and advertiser.
This is beginning to happen on the social platforms and will only escalate in 2007 as CPC and search continue to move farther apart from one another in performance numbers.
Metrics will be the talk of 2007. Google, Yahoo, Omniture, Mercent, Doubleclick, ValueClick and Network Solutions (among others) are going to force a re-examination of the traditional velvet ropes separating CPA, CPC and even CPM.
(That’s a “liger” in the picture, by the way…hybrid…get it?)
Sam:
Sorry for the late entry on this but I just remembered it. From WSJ.com earlier this year.:
Affiliate programs can be another source of runaway marketing costs. Affiliates are companies or Web sites that direct visitors to online merchants’ sites by posting the merchants’ ads or links on their sites. Merchants will share revenue or offer some type of commission for every referral from an affiliate that results in a sale.
Alibris, an online retailer that lets independent book, movie and music sellers post items for sale, discovered that the quality of customers sent to its Web site from affiliates differed widely.
Using its own analytics software and data from LinkShare Corp., a company that manages affiliate programs, Alibris can identify a shopper who came to its site from certain affiliates, because they’re “tagged” by LinkShare technology. Using its data, the bookseller can identify which shoppers are new or repeat customers. LinkShare is a unit of the Japanese Internet-portal company Rakuten Inc.
Alibris discovered that one of its largest affiliates, a price-comparison site, was sending it the same customers over and over again. Alibris suggested a new set of incentives to the affiliate: If it sent more new customers, it could continue to earn what it was getting before. The affiliate agreed to the new terms.