Google's Pay-per-action launching world wide expansion

Google announced that they have launched the worldwide expansion of its pay-per-action advertising beta. Pay-per-action is a pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined action. Google launched the beta of Pay-per-action in March.

"Pay-per-action advertising helped our company make the most of our marketing budget," said Alexandre Douzet, Executive Vice President and General Manager, TheLadders.com, the leading $100k+ job search web site and an early adopter of Google's pay-per-action advertising model. "At TheLadders.com, we are big proponents of marketing efficiency, so the ability to supplement our existing cost-per-click campaigns with a model that rewards qualified leads makes a lot of sense to us."

Now that the launch is live, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. “Going forward, advertisers who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the beta on a rolling basis,” Google said.

Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense. Publishers in the Google content network may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site's content. “These publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against CPC or CPM-based ads, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units,” Google added in a statement.

Pay-per-action is by some as an answer to click fraud with the currently common pay-per-click system. Advertisers complain that they pay for ads that were not legitimately clicked on by potential customers. Fraudulent clicks can be generated by people paid to click ads repeatedly or through automated software programs. The goal is to run out the advertiser’s ad budget, and lower their position. It can also be used to drive up the cost of keywords in a system.

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