Google Pay Per Action

[maxtower]

The market will balance all this out. PPC will continue to exist and so will CPA.
The problem with your example Bradley, is that a publisher won't place any of your ads on his site if he can get $19/lead from your competitor, so you would still be better off with adwords in this case. For CPA to be effective for a publisher, the site has to basically be built around the ad. In most cases a publisher is better off with PPC adsense.

Another huge problem with this is tracking. I'm sure google will figure this out, but most CPA networks are small right now. They have the time to work with individual advertisers and create a tracking system. Google will have to work out fraud on conversion fraud advertiser end now. If they don't have the proper checks in place what will stop me from creating a site that places CPA ads on publishers sites, but then never payout because I claim to never get a conversion?

[beeyjay]

If this works out, I wouldn't understand advertising anywhere else unless it was purely from a brand building perspective.

However, I am not really clear on how my ads will appear instead of my competitors. With adwords, obviously the highest bidder wins. Here, the bidding might come into play if the publisher is choosing himself (very affiliateish), but it sounds like if served automatically, the one with the highest conversion rate gets served. Does this mean there is no way I could pay myself out of having a crappy conversion rate?

Is this just going to lead to a bunch of squeeze page type links that are solely trying to convert so that their pay per action links appear more often? This would seem to inherently reduce the average quality of the leads and hence make the whole system flawed.

Why or why not?

I also thought this was cool:

[ QUOTE ]
With pay-per-action ads, you pay when a user, who reached your site through your ad, completes an action you've identified. Sometimes this action may be taken days after the user has first visited your site. Note that advertisers will remain responsible for conversions that occur up to 30 days after a pay-per-action ad was clicked.

[/ QUOTE ]

I was recently at a conference where analytics software was being shown and it was able to show a history for each visitor allowing you to see that while it looked like your sale/lead came from a direct request, that was actually that visitor's 3rd visit to your site in 2 weeks and the original visit had been inspired by a link from a press release or whatever.

Being able to track things to this level seems to be the future and it is getting pretty crazy.