Diorex

Google wants your conversion data. If you are already voluntarily sharing this with them, shame on you.

Sure Google analytics, Webmaster Central or Website Optimizer are useful tools with powerful features that are not readily available anywhere else for free. But have you ever stopped to think about why Google is spending millions to bring you free services?

If you ask Google, you get the stock answer along the lines of : “With tools like this, we show webmasters how to more profitably spend money on Google and thus are willing to spend even more.” or some variation of this. They are very aggressive about inviting big spenders into these beta tools to help further optimize websites and thus potentially spend more.

Last fall, Google offered up its tastiest free morsel yet. Google Checkout. No need to pay those pesky 3% transaction fees to Visa or Paypal, we will gladly absorb those fees ourself. What’s more, we will increase the CTR on your paid search ads by placing an image icon next to your PPC ads. This is something we will not allow publishers in Adsense to do, but for you we would be pleased to do so. Simply place this pixel in your footer and provide the URL for your thank you page, easy as can be.

Now, Google wants to further facilitate your online campaigns by removing the risk from advertisers on the content network. You will only pay for customers who actually complete a required action on your site. Simply tell us what each customer is worth to you and we will drop them at your doorstep. Oh yes, in order to best count those customers, we will need to place a tracking code on all of your pages.

So what does Google now know?

We have shared with them the paid search keywords that convert best through analytics.

They know where we get all of our natural traffic from Webmaster Central - to be fair they probably have this regardless.

We have shown them what phrasing, images, colors and other items convert a visitor to a customer at the highest rates with the optimizer tool.

We have shared with them the average sale per customer because we have allowed them to process our transaction for free.

And now, we are willing to tell them how much we are willing to pay for each one of those customers through CPA campaigns.

Now I do not have an MBA from a top tier business school, but would you want to share any of this data with your competitors, suppliers, partners, or anyone other than an accountant? Profit per sale, sales volume, average transaction size, conversion rate, or average lifetime value of a customer? I would consider all of these pretty darn proprietary, yet tens of thousands of publishers have handed this very data over to what could very well become your biggest competitor.

Competitor? If you are an affiliate, you earn money on the difference between the cost of the traffic and what the merchant will pay. Do you think Google might be able to cut a better deal and bypass you altogether? What about if you are a reseller of a product or service. Could Google just be a marketing partner at far higher volume and lower cost than you? Ask yourself if you are really the only person who can provide the service or product you provide or are you just a middleman who facilitates a transaction?

I suspect most would be middlemen. Google can earn far more by taking your cut of the profits and delivering the traffic directly to the end user of the product.

Not saying it is going to happen in a matter of months, but the more data you share with Google, the more likely Google can remove you from the equation.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 20th, 2007 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Google, Non Search Ads, PPC, Rants, Tools, paid search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.