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 Mortgage lenders, auto dealers, retailers and even mom-and-pop advertisers reliant upon customer leads have another way to advertise through Google.
Google has expanded the scope of its Pay-Per-Action (PPA) pricing model for AdWords, launching a global beta in some 24 languages, giving them the option paying only when they get results.
Pay-per-action is a new 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.
The search giant launched a U.S.-only beta test of PPA in March, and advertisers like executive job search site TheLadders.com were one of the early adopters--providing feedback on its performance and usability.
“The ability to supplement our existing cost-per-click campaigns with a model that rewards qualified leads made a lot of sense to us,” said Alexandre Douzet, executive vice president and general manager, TheLadders.com. “Pay-per-action advertising helped our company make the most of our marketing budget,” he said.
With PPA, consumers still click an ad, but advertisers only pay when they actually complete a predefined action (such as a purchase or signing up for a newsletter) on their site. “Pretty much anything that happens online can be an action,” says Rob Kniaz, Google’s product manager for, yes, monetization. “This is a tool could apply to almost any advertiser.”
The service threatens other pay-for-performance affiliate networks like ValueClick's Commission Junction and LinkShare, and could coax budget-minded and click-fraud leery advertisers to use Google more often.
Advertisers currently in the beta test will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. And other AdWords users who have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and have received over 500 conversions from cost-per-click or cost-per-impression ad campaigns in the past 30 days will automatically be added to the PPA beta test “on a rolling basis.” The option to create PPA campaigns and set the desired conversion action will be integrated into their AdWords accounts.
Pay-Per-Action ads are displayed only on the third-party web sites in Google’s AdSense network, and for the first time, these sites have the ability to pick and choose which ads they’d like to display. “With the old AdSense model, we target the ads,” explains Kniaz, “but publishers told us that they wanted the power to target their own ads.”
Advertisers can set up different payments for different actions; for instance, a loan consolidation company may pay a higher amount for a customer acquisition than for e-mail address collection.
Publishers in the Google content network who want greater control over the ads shown on their sites may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site's content.
The ads can be text, images or hyperlinked in-line text ads, these publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against cost-per-click (CPC) and CPM-based systems, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units.
With this new pricing model, both advertisers and publishers gain more precision and control over their efforts to effectively spend advertising budgets and deliver relevant ads to related website content. Pay-per-action advertising is now available to qualifying advertisers worldwide.
While online retailers and e-commerce sites seem like the obvious candidates for PPA campaigns, the pricing model has value for “anyone in the business of lead generation,” said Kniaz. “Most advertisers have a specific number of conversions, or a specific ROI they are looking for; and this model can bring those two together.”
Google would not reveal the number of impressions served in the limited beta period, but Kniaz stressed the amount of available inventory, as well as advertisers using the service will increase as new publishers and advertisers join.
Because publishers do choose the ads specifically, clearly the volume of the beta is less than what you would expect from the Google AdSense network…but by growing the beta, it will improve both sides of the equation, said Kniaz.
But, others like digital marketing firm iMarketing Ltd, declined to be part of the beta--preferring to gauge a wider reaction to the pricing model's ROI and functionality. “We knew it would take a bit of time before our big clients would want to try it with their campaigns,” said Francis Dimayuga, senior manager, search marketing, iMarketing Ltd.
Some search marketers add that the PPA model represents a new attempt to garner business from potential advertisers that are wary of escalating PPC costs, as the return on [Google] and [Yahoo] advertising dollars has been dwindling for quite some time.
The beta requires advertisers to place a snippet of JavaScript at the point where an action happens. “Let us say you have got a thank you page that pops up after someone signs up for a newsletter,” Kniaz explains. “You would put some script there and we are able to track when that action happens.”
Sources: http://www.infozine.com/, http://www.itnews.com.au/, http://www.clickz.com/, http://www.theregister.co.uk/,
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