Google Pay Per Action has now been out for just under a month now and I wanted to circle back and give you some early reports on the types of numbers both publishers and advertisers are seeing.
Advertising With Google Pay Per Action One advertiser opted and created Google Pay Per Action ads and reported his findings in a Search Engine Watch Forums thread. In short, the set up was easy but the results are poor. He has yet to see any impressions on his PPA ads. Here are his notes on Google Pay Per Action from the advertiser's perspective.
-Setup in adwords was easy, since google has segregated PPA ads at the campaign level under a new "Pay-Per-Action" tab (your regular ads are placed under a "Standard" tab.)-Setting my "PPA bid" (maxCPA) was slightly confusing, since in the beta test this is done in the "Conversion Tracking" area. I assume this will change in production. (In general it would be great to have total flexibility on the payment side, with the option to pay for ads any way we like: CPM, PPC, PPA and even change anytime we want. But I assume that would require a huge system change.)
-Anyway, we do lead generation, so I set my maxCPA at $10, which is what I expect to pay/lead from my current cost/conversion stats.
-I did *not* need to change or modify the existing adwords conversion tracking code on our website in any way - which was a big relief.
-However, so far the PPA ad has received no impressions, so the need is on the ad distribution side of the house i.e. getting adsense publishers to run these ads. We're in a very specialized vertical market, so this does not come as a big surpise, but until I see some distribution I cannot evaluate the ad performance.
Publishing With Google Pay Per Action Let's flip things around and look at the publishers side of things. As Tamar reported, I told a story through pay-per-action. In fact, Google emailed me to tell me they liked the idea and explained that you can show a maximum of 6 Pay Per Action ads on a page (which is why the remaining are not showing). So what did I see?
(1) I have documented the steps on publishing pay per action ads on your site at Search Engine Land. It is fairly easy.
(2) One thing I would like is the ability to filter ads by ad type. So if I only wanted text link units, it would only show me advertisers who are offering such units. Google told me this may come, but right now they do not support this filtering option on the AdSense side.
(3) Stats: I have received almost 5,000 impressions on those ads to date. Keep in mind, the ads are on a single post in my personal blog. Of that, I have realized only about 35 clicks. And, as of right now, I have earned zero dollars.
I suspect as more and more publishers and advertisers experiment with Google Pay Per Action, more and more publishers and advertisers will begin to see results. Keep in mind, I have isolated one advertiser and one publisher (me) in this case study. So the results are far from statistically significant.
Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.
