The initial launch of this beta project was undertaken in March of this year with select Google clients. Based on a positive feedback, Google have announced that this project will now be undertaken worldwide. An announcement by Google stated that, "Starting today, 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."

This innovative program that resembles an affiliate program in many ways, should keep advertisers happy, taking into consideration the following factors:

• It will give a clear definition to a company's marketing budget.
  
• Advertiser's will feel that pay-per-action-advertising offers more credibility towards a marketing campaign.
  
• There will no longer be any doubt in the mind of the advertiser that false hits are generated by their AdWords program, leading to lost advertising revenue.
  

Advertisers will have to clearly define what they want a user to do on their site. This can be done in the 'Conversion Tracking (PPA Beta)' section of the advertiser's AdWords account, after which a cost-per-action (CPA) value will have to be set. To confirm a conversion, a relevant landing page will have to be made to which the user arrives at after a conversion is made. The advertiser will then have to ensure that conversions will be tracked by making sure that the AdWords conversion tracking has been implemented. A daily budget can also be set by the advertiser towards campaigns. To ensure that an action goes live, the advertiser has to verify that the conversion tracking code has been set up correctly.

In conclusion, the program looks promising. However, time will only tell whether pay-per-action advertising will be popular with advertisers as well as publishers. Something had to give based on the number of complaints on click fraud, and this might well be the answer.


Reference list:
Google Press Center: News Announcement
Google AdWords Help Center

About the Author:
Cyrus Taraporvala is currently based in Auckland, New Zealand, and spends most of his time offering a few web related services including domain registration and web hosting through The Promotion Group network of sites. He also maintains PromotionData.com, a community project for site promotion and web development.