So today we got an invitation to try out Google’s Pay-per-action (read affiliate program) and it’s got an obvious problem: the cost structure — you have to set a fixed dollar cost for an action (in most cases, a sale). This is a problem because if you have a product line with a wide range of prices, the justifiable cost per action (CPA) will vary based on the price of each product. The cost should be a percentage of the sale — just like affiliate networks do it.
With a fixed cost, I can’t figure out a justifible CPA that would attract affiliates. The only option we’re left with is to put a reasonable CPA for the majority of our products and watch it carefully. To be honest though, I don’t see this being any more effective than AdSense so if AdSense doesn’t work for you, CPA probably won’t either… hopefully I’m wrong.