When Google started their new Pay-Per-Action (CPA) advertisers BETA program back in March, industry naysayers cried “the affiliate model will die and Commission Junction will bite the dust.” I really wasn’t too worried, but who knows. Google is such a behemoth and truly taking over the world, so she could overtake our world too, but I seriously doubt it.

Well I say the proof is in the puddin! See below for feedback from an industry insider that tried Google PPA with 2 customers and got lackluster results. Also see comments from one of our most infamous industry naysayers. ;-) Clickz has the scoop:

Google Opens Performance-Based System to Qualified Ad Buyers

“ClickZ columnist Kevin Lee, executive chairman and co-founder of search marketing firm Did-it.com, isn’t so sure the new service will bring in big bucks for Google. “I don’t think it’s going to be a big chunk of [Google’s] business,” he said. Lee believes Google’s system automatically serves the ad that will garner the most money for Google, so if CPC ads are more likely to be clicked, they could be served in lieu of potentially-costlier but less-clicked PPA ads.

Lee conducted tests of the service for two advertiser clients a couple months ago with lukewarm results. “In the tests we’ve run, we didn’t find that it got much volume at all,” said Lee, whose clients were running lead generation and customer acquisition campaigns for the trial. “Our thought was really what we predicted: that CPC ads actually earn Google more money than the CPA ads, and so the ad server just automatically runs the CPC ads instead,”