Google's new PPA advertising product

Google is testing a new advertising system that allows businesses to advertise on a cost per action basis. You can find Google's own announcement

here.

*How does Google's new product work?

Until now, Google has primarily sold pay-per-click (PPC) ads, so-called AdWords ads: advertisers pay when someone on Google or a Google partner site clicks on the ad.

Google AdWords has one big advantage and one big disadvantage: You only pay for clicks of potential customers, but you risk paying a lot of money for nothing because of click fraud.

There has been a lot of debate around click fraud because Google has a short term financial incentive to promote it. Google's new advertising product is "pay per action" (PPA). You don't pay per click anymore but you pay when a customer takes further action, such as requesting a catalog, signing up for a newsletter or buying a product.

PPA advertising is meant to mitigate the risks of click fraud.

*How can Google track the action?
If you use Google's PPA advertising product, then you must use Google's conversion tracking code in the HTML code of your web pages.

Of course, the advertiser has an incentive not to confirm the action, but cheating does not make sense. Like PPC ads, PPA ads will likely be ranked by profitability to Google.

Note that Google's pay per action program is currently in beta test. This means that there are some limitations:

> participation is by invitation only, you must fill out a web form to request participating in the program
> the PPA program is currently only available to US customers
> ads are limited to Google's content network of partner sites (Google AdSense)