Google advertisers to pay per action By Sonja Koremans
Google advertisers will only be billed when products or services are purchased on their site under a new pay-per-action pricing trial being rolled out in Australia.
Hundreds of high-traffic businesses have been invited to road test the system from today as an alternative to the pay-per-click model.
A similar Google trial earlier this year proved popular in the United States, however the search giant has not committed to offering it permanently.
“We are rolling it out as a trial and it is likely to be successful here but at this stage we are uncertain whether it will be made available, we are optimistic though,” said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.
Pay-per-action enables advertisers to pay only when a pre-defined action had been completed on their site such as when a user made a purchase, signed up for a newsletter or completed any other clearly defined action, Mr Shilkin said.
The system is designed to give advertisers and publishers more precision and control over their online budgets, he said.
Advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can create pay-per-action campaigns. Those which have enabled AdWords conversion tracking and received more than 500 conversions from their CPC and CPM-based campaigns in the past 30 days will be automatically added to the trial.
