AzoogleAds’ Cost Per Action

Matt of the new BlogHerald talks about looking beyond Adsense and refer to AzoogleAds as a potential alternative for monetizing your blog. He refers to The Forum Fix which allegedly earned somewhere in the vicinity of $45,000PHP 2,640,848INR 3,813,741EUR 42,854CNY 327,524 a month from it.

I have heard of this before but did not really get into it because of lack of feedback from other blogs about it. Anyway, I tested and tried to sign up for the program but ran into some bottleneck like requiring a TIN, among others. And I am not sure if they allow international affiliates.

Then, there’s the CPA programs which made me a little skeptic. CPA is short for Cost Per Action which means the publisher/affiliate only gets paid when an action is completed — a form being filled out, subscription to a newsletter, or a product being purchased. This is basically similar to Amazon Associates but that only covers sale commissions.

Although CPA usually pays much better than your usual Adsense ads (say $2PHP 117INR 169EUR 2CNY 15 per filled up form or $3PHP 176INR 254EUR 3CNY 22 per successful subscription) the success rate is way lower. If you find it hard for your visitors to just click on an ad, how much more for them to spend 2 minutes to fill up a form? (accidental visitors have an attention span of half a second or so.)

I think this program will better fit forums better than blogs as people stay a lot longer in forums.