With the wild success of highly transactional performance marketing models like Google AdSense /AdWords, its easy to get starry-eyed around the dollars and lose track of the fact that in some cases human expertise and “craft” are ever more relevant in today’s performance markeitng landscape.

”The Goog” relies on a millions of small machine mediated transactions to earn its gobs of revenue. As we all know, the model is superb for many forms of promotion.

Yet the need still remains for the human touch. Not to toot our own horn too much here, but we receive quite a bit of praise from our Advaliant customers who cherish the personal attention and expertise our reps provide to them on a daily basis to help improve the efficacy of thier campaigns.

In our CPA network model, we rely on both the machine and man. However, when it comes to optimizing a campaign’s success, much of it relies on the “feel” of our business development reps who have the experience of running thousands of campaigns and the knowledge of the network of affiliates.

In the Advaliant business, the more premium there is on qualification, the more need there is for great campaign management from the advertiser and the network representative. These types of transactions are less prone to plug-and-play software applications of marketing..they require the human element.

While this model does not necessarily scale as well as the Google model, there is a sizeable market of Affiliate networks that serve the needs of marketers looking to acquire customers and qualified leads that don’t lend themsleves as readily to unmediated PPA or PPC campaigns running on a vast network of publishers of all sizes and shapes.

The principal issue in the success in these types of human-mediated campaigns is the quality of the human. A bad reputation exists in some marketer’s minds regarding Affiliate marketing networks. This stems from the lack of integrity and honesty due to prior greedy behavior of some of the unscrupulous networks, some of which still exist today.

Advertisers seeking to leverage the benefits of human-assited Cost Per Action marketing should seek out the networks that are looking to build long-term sustainable partnerships and ones that readily offer information transparency regarding the campaign. Also, most good CPA networks will only charge for performance (thought sometimes there is a minimal upfront fee). This aligns the goals of the advertiser and the network.

The quality CPA networks will continue to profit in today’s landscape becasue there are simply some things that the “machine” can’t do and that only the human mind is capable of.