Google trials pay-per-result advertising
Published June 23rd, 2006
Google has written to some of its AdSense publishers offering them the chance to trial ‘cost-per-action’ (CPA) adverts on their sites.
The search engine giant is apparently planning to introduce a full CPA advertising network (also known as affiliate marketing), where publishers are paid a share of revenue based on a specific online action such as a purchase or registration for a service.
The new advertising system is apparently intended to complement, not replace, Google’s current AdSense model of pay-per-click (CPC).
Affiliate marketing is becoming increasingly popular on the web, and is used by companies such as Amazon.com and eBay, as well as other advertising outlets such as ValueClick and DoubleClick.
CPA and CPC advertising models are problematic for many niche online publishers who do not get sufficient numbers of page views to gain significant revenues on the usually low average clickthrough rates (1 to 2 per cent) and per-click payments offered by AdSense and others.
The CPM model (cost-per-thousand views) more closely resembles display advertising in traditional media where building brand awareness is rated as high, if not higher, than instant results. But CPA and CPC models continue to put pressure on CPM rates, many of which do not even come close to paying for the free content web users demand.
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