Google Analytics & the "pay-per-click-you-like" future

Google Analytics:

Learn how visitors interact with your website and identify the navigational bottlenecks that keep them from completing your conversion goals. Find out how profitable your keywords are across search engines and campaigns. Pinpoint where your best customers come from and which markets are most profitable to you. Google Analytics gives you this and more through easy-to-understand visually enhanced reports.

This is a giant step towards the "pay-per-click-you-like" future I predicted previously in "Killing click-fraud (and the competition) with one stone". The gist is:

Offer a money-back-guarantee, no-questions-asked, on every click delivered. "Pay for only the clicks you like," Google could say.

No more haggling over suspicious clicks. Just use Google Analytics to see exactly which ones convert -- or otherwise look sufficiently like a real customer to you -- and pay only for those clicks, getting a refund on all others.

What does this mean? As an advertiser, you would pay more per click -- but for fewer, verified-valuable clicks. Google gets a new stream of feedback about what clicks you want, and which clicktrails leading up to -- and then through -- your site are most likely to convert. If you try to game Google by not paying for good hits -- well, that's just like no one clicking on your ads in the first place. You tend to fall out of the rankings because you're not making Google any money. You could game this for at most one payment period before you were only hurting yourself, and to climb back into the system you'd have to overpay in the future by about as much as you shaved off on the way down.

So I reiterate my previous prediction: a pay-per-click-you-want offering, with a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee on all unwanted clicks, is coming. And it will give a major competitive advantage to the player who effectively implements it first. As I noted:

So the day Google adopts this kind of policy, click fraud ceases being a major problem for them and starts to be a giant club they can use to beat off their smaller competitors. Who else will have as large and detailed a map of which clicks are wanted? And once you've been with Google for a while, and fed it months of data about the clicks you like and don't, switching to any other advertiser would involve a big cost and efficiency hit while the patterns are relearned.

Mmm, economies of scale and customer lock-in. Call it Pay Per Wanted Click (PPWC)/Cost Per Wanted Click (CPWC) advertising. And if Google doesn't eventually do this, someone else looking to leapfrog them will.

With Google Analytics, it's now even more likely that Google will be the first to offer a clicks-you-want guarantee. And the pricing power they'll acquire -- the ability to finely price-discriminate, in the economists' sense, charging each customer exactly by their ability to pay -- will be incredible, beyond that of more traditional monopoly pricing with only limited price discrimination.

Which leads naturally into another prediction. I agree with Rudy Rouhana's Long Bet: Google will face antitrust problems, probably before 2010. (This is not to imply Google will have done anything wrong. It's just the nature of the beast, as the also-rans and political opportunists of either party realize they can wield a regulatory club against Google.)

Technorati Tags: google, adwords, payperclick, analytics, urchin, antitrust

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