Google goes global with new-fangled ad engine

You pay only for results

By Cade Metz in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Small Biz, 21st June 2007 23:45 GMT

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Google has extended its Pay-Per-Action ad beta to non-US advertisers, giving them the option paying only when they get results.

With Pay-Per-Action, an AdWords optional extra that launched stateside in March, advertisers aren’t charged unless an ad generates some sort of action on their website, such as a sale or a sign-up. “Pretty much anything that happens online can be an action,” says Rob Kniaz, Google’s product manager for, yes, monetization. “This is a tool could apply to almost any advertiser.”

Google has also extended the US beta to a wider audience. Starting today, Pay-Per-Action is available to any advertiser with at least 500 conversions in the past thirty days under Adwords’ conversion tracking tool. As these users log-on to AdWords, they’ll automatically see a new link for building Pay-Per-Action campaigns.

Pay-Per-Action ads are displayed only on the third-party web sites in Google’s AdSense network, and for the first time, these sites have the ability to pick and choose which ads they’d like to display.“With the old AdSense model, we target the ads,” explains Kniaz, “but publishers told us that they wanted the power to target their own ads.”

The beta requires advertisers to place a snippet of JavaScript at the point where an action happens. “Let’s say you’ve got a thank you page that pops up after someone signs up for a newsletter,” Kniaz explains. “You’d put some script there and we’re able to track when that action happens.” ®

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