Google Adsense’s New Pay-Per-Acquisition Model

Google’s pay per click created a small revolution in the online ad world when it was launched a few years ago. Now, Google has announced that it is going to offer a new model to its advertisers. Instead of pay per click, Google’s new program will offer a pay per acquisition model.

 

Last summer, Google began with a small control group that experimented with this model, in which they paid Google a small fee every time a surfer took action on their site. Right now, advertisers need to pay Google a fee every time someone clicks on their ad. However, this has been widely abused by unethical companies who pay people to click on competitor’s ads in order to drive up costs. In the new model, advertisers will pay Google only if someone fills out a form or actually make a purchase on their site.

 

Taking this a step further, advertisers can select the specific action a potential customer can make on their site for which they will pay Google. Publishers can also pick and choose the ads they want to display on their site. Other than that, the ads will retain their popular look-and-feel and will look identical to the existing Adsense’s pay-per-click ads.

 

Right now, 75 odd publishers and advertisers are a part of this program and Google plans to add more to this group on a rolling basis. The new model will be implemented only on Google's content network or Adsense ads and not on Google's primary search engine or the Adwords program.

 

Such a program will be welcome by services such as lawyers, mortgage companies, as well as brokers. At the same time, it might raise interesting debates about the transparency and ethics of such a program because publishers might be tempted to promote only those products that pay them better, instead of better products.

 

An Adwords agency will be useful to help setup a campaign of this type. They will keep track of which keywords are most successful and research into new profitable keywords.