How much do affiliates over inflate merchant's PPC costs? Kevin Lee over at Clickz writes about the continuing controversy. He alludes to a very creative way affiliates can cheat at the arbitrage game. He also goes into the issue of how merchants sometimes use different accounting methods for PPC vs affiliate customer acquisition and why that's the wrong way to measure the ROI or effectiveness of the different channels.
Kevin writes: "Merchants are growing increasingly concerned that affiliates engaging in direct-link PPC (define) search and even buying clicks to their own sites are inflating overall CPCs (define) within the Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft search marketplaces.
Affiliates, on the other hand, love finding keywords that allow for arbitrage of the CPC against the commission paid by merchants or lead-gen partners. Unlike a few years ago, the intersection between affiliate PPC search arbitrage and the marketers' direct PPC search activity is looking less like the Wild West and more like a set of ongoing experiments for which give and take will ultimately create a sustainable business model."
Read the rest over at Clickz:
The Affiliate PPC Search Controversy Continues.
Affiliate PPC Raises Merchant Bid Prices - What to do?
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