Earlier in the week I was going through a Client’s AdWords account and saw a reference to PPA pricing. This reminded me of Google’s seemingly vanished venture.
Back in March of last year, Google AdWords announced the launch of a US only Beta for a new AdSense Network pricing model Called PPA or Pay Per Action.
Ostensibly, this would allow ads to be displayed on participating AdSense publishers sites, with cost levied only upon completion of the Advertiser specified conversion action.
What this means, is the advertiser only pays for results. If a participating AdWords client specified an ecommerce purchase completion as the goal point for which Google would charge them, then that is the only point cost would be incurred.
This is quite different from to the current CPC (pay for every ad click, regardless of results) and CPM (pay for every 1000 times an ad is displayed, regardless of result or clicks) price models.
It would be very interesting to work with this type of model, however, the question is “where is it?”
In June of last year, the Beta had been extended to advertisers for testing outside the US with pretty much nothing to follow since.
I looked this up in the AdWords help center and found a Quick Start guide to setting up a PPA Campaign. Oddly enough, if you look closely at the wording, it’s all written in the future tense, which I don’t believe I’ve ever seen before in this type of document.
Is this dead in the water, or upcoming? Perhaps someday, Net Archaeologists will find the corpse of this idea buried in virtual rubble.