Google PPA (Pay Per Action) Program

By now, you must be aware of the announcement made by Google about their new PPA (Pay-Per-Action) program which marks their debut in the affiliate marketing industry. Google, so far, had been leading the advertisement industry with their AdSense and AdWords programs and with their launch of Pay per Action programs, though in beta test mode, existing AdWords users can right away signup for the beta program and start using it (beta feature is currently available to AdWords advertisers in the United States on a limited basis) without much fuzz. Google’s recent acquisition of AdScape made their plans clear about entering into the video game advertising industry but that will take some time before it nears any kind of domination in the that market segment. Let’s put our focus on their PPA program and leverage it to our best.

Background of PPA

PPA is Pay Per Action. An action which is defined by the advertiser that could be anything from clicking on a button and entering your email address to filling up a survey and submitting it. Most prominent action event from PPA programs are when a user clicks on an Ad in a website, lands on a landing page of the advertiser’s website and buys a product. Buying a product marks the completion of the action defined by the advertiser. Google’s PPA program is exactly going to do that. Note that, it’s not necessarily an advertiser who will always create an action plan, could be a publisher too who can create a plan to track conversions on her/his own website.

How does Google PPA work?

It’s quite simple and works like most other PPA programs in the market. There is nothing unusual about it, except the new text link ad format that can be placed inline along with the content. You can use the text link ads as a hyperlink within your content too! Here is a quick rundown of the steps involved in this program:

Step1: Advertiser starts by creating a campaign, define an action such as ‘click and purchase’ that you would like a user to do on your site. Then set the amount that you are willing to pay for the action when it completes. An example could be, a hosting provider creates a campaign, defines the action as ’signup for $1 per month hosting account’ and sets the cost as $0.3 for the action when it completes.

Step2: Now that an advertise has created a campaign, defined an action and set the cost per action, she/her will setup conversion tracking to enable Google track the completion of an action (conversion) through the tracking. Finish this step by installing the tracking code on your website and verify the code so that Google can begin tracking the conversions from your site.

Step3: Select a name for your product (select it as it is), a product group, name of your campaign and the language you will use.

Step4: Select the countries where you target to show your Ads and it will be shown only to the publishers from those countries.

Step5: Create your Ad, basically create an Ad unit with text upto a maximum of 90 characters. Keep it simple but make it powerful and avoid any words that do not add value.

Step6: Now the last step, set a daily budget for your campaign and based on your budget the Ads will be displayed. The frequency of Ads depends on your budget. Note that, you as an advertiser, will remain responsible for a conversion that occurs upto 30 days after the PPA ad was clicked.

How better will Google’s strategy be against their competitors regarding the fraudulent purchases is something that we will have to wait and watch over next few months.

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