[oranges]

Google Referrals allow you to choose specific products or groups of products to advertise on your site, allowing you to match ads to your content.

Choose up to 15 products or specific ads to rotate in the referral unit. You can also choose categories and keywords to ensure you get newer ads as they become available.
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Pseudo-affiliate marketing. I'll have to think on this a while to figure out if its a good thing.

[Vinny O'Hare]

let me know if you figure it out

[oranges]

Not a good thing.

If these are simply products from merchants that have affiliaue programs, there doesn't seem to be any reason to give google 45% like adsense when even cj only requires 30%.

If these aree products from merchants who don't have affiliate programs, than 12 items is really not enough and I assume those products will have google brand name somewhere on the ad.

The problem is that it is very new and not enough products to know how it'll turn out. No real cow products at all :-)

[Vinny O'Hare]

The prices I am seeing is 2 to 3 times anything I can make with affiliate programs. You just have to look around.

I just added about 20 to my travel site, I havent had a problem yet finding a product because I am not looking for any.

[ecomcity]

Very poor implimentation by Google staff. Obviously no one there in the PPA program has any product sales or affiliate network experience. Damn shame they don't even allow a merchant to set a Percentage (%) of the sales amount... only one flat per action fee. They have no individual product creatives so the accepted typical merchants just seem to provide the common fly-trap text ads.

I've had zip success even finding merchants using this Hybred pay-per-action who even bothered uploading image banners in all the various sizes. They also don't have the effective Video Ads used in Adwords.

I complained to my Adwords rep the PPA merchants had no conversion ranking system for helping the Adsense publishers pick out the winners. They then came up with some 3rd grade star system that no one there seems to know the meaning of the few stared merchants. Not being the shy type I made the Google rep look over Holdup Suspenders PPA reports. Then explain why a merchant converting on the PPA program at a steady 19% of all click had no stars and a cumbersome way to even find their creative. PS; the huge selection of banners and text ads had high conversion landing pages to help the Adsense publishers.

Huge opportunity there for the smaller niche merchant if they all weren't so lazy and inclined to port over just some text Ads. For 4 years straight my Google merchant banner Ads get 5 times higher CTR rate then the equilivent Adwords text Ads. The Google Adwords reps still just scratch their heads over that stat. Conversion ratio for the banners on the content network is at normal levels too. I explained the MFA wanks and content network click cheats can't manipulate banners. Duh! Googles cut appears to be 20% for doing all the network legwork right down to commission payouts.