Is Click Arbitrage A Thing Of The Past?

**KirstyM** · 17-04-07

I've just been trying to explain the concept of click arbitrage to someone and have spent a fruitless half hour trying to find some examples.

I've managed to find a few overture diehards knocking around in Googles Adwords results and also in MSN's paid search.

I never tried that way of making money myself, so is it dead in the water now or are there still a few diehards out there?

**davec** · 17-04-07

There are still some people making lots of money via PPC arbitrage that I know of.

**chrisuk** · 17-04-07

Most ppc affiliates are presumably buying ppc traffic or domains, a lot of adsensers are gone from Google but thats a good thing.

Buying from one network source and selling via another is pretty normal and has been established for years and years in many sectors not just clicks. Adwords to Adsense was just arbing across the same network and is probably what you have to thank for all your quality score hassles.

People are still making money, maybe not as easily as 3-4 years back. I should think most ppc affiliates arb at various levels though across many networks not just Google. If your not into waiting for SEO to kick in then there are only so many ways of getting volume traffic after all.

**Alfie** · 17-04-07

Has anyone got a laymans definition of what Click Arbitrage is?

Cheers,

Alf

**Dave@Profitistic** · 17-04-07

Ok, in a (very brief) nutshell, with Google it is where a publisher buys adwords ads (usually more obscure 'long-tail' ads) for as little as possible.

He then directs visitors who click on these ads to a landing page(s) structured to highlight high-paying Adsense ads in the hope that the visitor clicks on one (often to escape the page!).

So, you pay 0.8p for an obscure adword placement, the user then clicks this and is taken to the landing page where the publisher may receive £1.50 if the visitor clicks a strategically placed high paying ad (for example debt consolidation, etc). Its all about averages and volume, and Google hate it because it gives very little to this 'visitor' in terms of quality.

These pages are often called MFA or 'Made For Adsense' or 'Made For Arb'.

**tomj** · 17-04-07

http://www.nma.co.uk/Articles/32799/...age+sites.html

**chrisuk** · 17-04-07

Although far more revenue comes to the ppc's from traffic trade off than they would like you to believe, many many many ppc partners buy traffic. I don't think that in itself is really a bad thing. It boils down more to the landing page and probably what constitutes too many ads.

Lets not forget that the ppc's pretty much created the issue anyway when years back they would jump through hoops to get companies and people to run their white label sites, they'd pretty much tell you to buy the traffic if you can't domain or seo it. Google handing Adsense out to every man and their dog is also one of the strongest reasons for a lot of the bad press.

PPC affiliates will just start adding more and more content; seeing that already in the listings and in doing so they lean towards the better user experience the engines would prefer.

I think pages that are just ads (pure arb) will find it harder, pages with content far less and thats the way it will roll for ppc affiliates.

Good article here http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006...e-defined.html that defines this issue and shows I think why its difficult to separate good from bad arbitrage.

**GerryW** · 18-04-07

I wish it would die personally, I think it literally destroys the web, and reduces trust in the Google ads.

**chrisuk** · 18-04-07

Problem is 6-7 years ago click affiliates were heavily encouraged by the Espotting's, Goto.com's of the era to partner via all sorts of cobrand programs. You didn't need to buy traffic so much in those days of course. Equally traffic feeds weren't handed out to everybody. However entire new companies sprung up off the back of these opportunities, lead gen companies, super affiliates and the like.

Currently these companies have to buy their traffic and its a problem because everyones doing it. Sure the top dogs have adapted anyway and thats what will happen, ppc affiliates will adapt or try something else. However if you know your ppc history you will know that the ppc's are very much responsible for encouraging the method's their partners use to drive traffic, that is fact.

At the same time new partners are going to ask how they can get laser targeted traffic to their feeds, answer - they buy it of course and thats why the listings get saturated. Do you really think if it was just 9-10 sites doing this that anyone would even notice, of course not.

Equally I bet even at the engines you have conflict of interest, on the one hand the biz dev team looking at how to max clicks, and on the other hand the search engineers looking to reign it in.

Nevermind the fact that many tier 2,3 ppcs are made up of partners who do nothing but buy traffic and you start to realise that its not just the affiliates who stand to lose revenue.

Affiliates though will have to start looking at making their sites more useful, really thats the way its gonna play out.

**John@PP** · 23-04-07

Click Arbitrage is the main reason we don't advertise on the content network, though we do allow search on the content network, when we where testing our keyword ranges it quadrupled our CPA.

**davec** · 26-04-07

Equally traffic feeds weren't handed out to everybody.

I think this is a very important point, even 2 or 3 years ago it was very difficult to get an overture (as it was then) feed compared to now. The saturation of many providers with poorer quality partners to boost clicks in the short-term has not only caused a drop in bid prices for all partners, but has eroded a lot of faith in the large feed providers.

**chrisuk** · 26-04-07

I couldn't agree more, once it became easy for anyone to add ads to their pages with just a bit of javascript, eg adsense, then buying traffic for clicks moved into the mainstream. Big big mistake and of course the big lead gen companies and companies running white label feeds all get put in the same room as all the thousands of adsense spammers. What was your lead gen business is now classed as adspam, cheers!

Buying traffic will not go away, the serious players will produce content and useful reasons to use their sites along side the ads, the slackers will give up or try something else, quality scores I think will go someway to distinguish between the two.