Google AdWords Pay-Per-Action is in beta and they’re answering your questions here. I’ll be watching closely how they plan to handle advertising accounts that get very low conversion. If you only pay-per-action, what happens when nobody takes an action? Was that free branding you just got?
Also in AdSense news, the AdSense API is ready for developers. Watch for smart marketers to develop products that help you manage and optimize your AdSense account. You might want to subscribe to Google’s AdSense Calendar for updates.
ryan oelke says
pay-per-action is NO GOOD. Many pros of blogging, podcasting, and videocasting are against because advertisers are imposing on you a ridiculous requirement that no other medium has. magazines, radio ads, and tv ads require NO action for payment. Furthermore, the tracking of action is very limited. People can take actions off the ad in other ways, like through a phone call. Overall, in principle it cheapens our medium as bloggers and podcasters.
Graham English says
Thanks for the input. I know that actions can be very hard to track. I have fail-safe after fail-safe on certain ad campaigns and I can still manually track actions that didn’t get counted.
Graham English says
Search Engine News is reporting that Google’s PPA is effectively an affiliate marketing program. I hadn’t thought of it that way. This could be really huge.