Google considers pay-per-action (PPA) advertising model?
By: Jonathan Briggs
September 27, 2006
Site Pro News discusses in The Death of Google Adsense And Other Myths how Google may be changing the way it encourages content publishers to offer advertising space to advertisers.
Currently when we set up an advertising campaign for a client using Google Adwords, we have the choice to limit the advertising to search results pages or to extend it to "content partners" who have signed up to Google's Adsense programme.
A quick look at the advertising results shows that search ads are much more effective in producing targeted visitors to our sites and some of those visitors become customers. Advertising next to content seems to work less well with fewer clicks and fewer conversions.
We are not alone is seeing this (and indeed Google is itself well aware) and many advertisers, as a result, focus their efforts on search campaigns.
As Site Pro News points out one of the reasons for the poor quality of referrals from content sites are the large number of poor sites within the content network. Google has made it very easy to sign up as part of the network and some sites have added AdSense advertising space just because they can.
The article suggests that Google may soon move from a Pay-per-click model for content ads to a Pay-per-action or pay-per-sale model in which the advertiser only pays when the visitor makes a purchase or signs up for an enquiry.
This could be very significant for both advertisers and publishers. Content advertising suddenly becomes much more interesting from a client's perspective if they only pay for a sale and the publisher suddenly has a real incentive to make their content really relevant; driving real sales.
We will watch with interest and experiment with these new types of advertising as soon as they become available.