Google’s new pay-per-action ads
June 21, 2007 4:01 pm News, Web Programming, WordPress
Google announced today that it will begin offering its new pay-per-action ad service to its higher-traffic publishers (over 500 conversions per month). While it’s great that Google is offering this new service, I’m not exactly sold on how effective it will be for publishers. Google’s standpoint is that the pay-per-action ad, which only pays the publisher once the person who’s clicked the ad signs up for a service or completes another such task on the advertiser’s site, will cut down on frivolous or downright illegal clicks by people being paid to do so, or bloggers cheating on their own sites. I’m sure this will happen, and I’m sure it will push more companies towards online advertising that have been hitherto reticent to jump into such a murky and unknown market. On the other hand, as a publisher, I’m not sure I want to be responsible for someone else’s crappy site. For example, if Google puts an ad on a page that links to a site that wants its users to sign up for a free service, but the form is so long and intrusive that less than 1% of the people who click the ad end up signing up, I don’t want that ad on my site anymore. So, the solution could be as simple as the problem, if Google has acknowledged it and is planning to account for it: rank the ads by their overall conversion rate across all publishers. Then, if a particular ad performs terribly no matter what site the users are coming in from, push it down the list, so publishers can display ads for better written sites in their valuable ad space. Of course, right now Google makes its money from those very publishers, so I’m sure the way they display the ads is the same as for the standard AdSense–the more the advertiser pays, the better their position.
Zach :
Date: June 29, 2007 @ 8:29 am
Google isn’t inventing anything new here, CPA ads have been extremely common, and perhaps considered the norm, before Google entered the market place and opened up their PPC ads to the world. Generally CPA payouts are much larger than the per-clicks and are adjusted so the ECPM or EPC is equal to an average PPC ad.