Mar 22nd, 2007
Google Cost Per Action
Google is taking another big step in their advertising. They are now testing something called cost per action which will only charge advertisers for actions visitors perform on their site such as registering, downloading something, making a purchase etc.
There are many who belive that CPA will take CPC and Cost per Impression out of existance, but I’m not one of them…at least not yet. I think CPA is a brilliant move and it will appeal to many advertisers out there who are looking for this end result, but I also think that there will still be a large market for CPC. There are some types of websites that are only looking for traffic. Their sites don’t necessarily have or need a call to action.
It will be very interesting to see where this goes. I hope to be involved in the testing.
Yeah, I think you’re right. CPA ads will never take over Google’s model completely for economic reasons. Google’s making way too much money from ppc ads and even cpm to replace their cash cow. Even if this test works out and they offer it as another option like site targeting and CPM ads, I would be very surprised to ever see these CPA ads on Google’s search network. It will most likely only apply to their content partners (adsense) like it is now. It would be great for advertisers because they would have complete control over their cost per acquisition, but Google would lose too much by giving up their bread and butter–CPC.