Notice how and where (bolded):
Starting today, advertisers in the beta will see an alert in their AdWords account informing them that they can now create pay-per-action campaigns. Going forward, advertisers who 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 beta on a rolling basis.
Pay-per-action ads are only shown on publisher sites in the Google content network, also known as Google AdSense™ for content sites.
I’ll be curious to see how this plays out. I’ve been beta’ing PPA with a client, and it’s little more than a black box at this point. Put in a bid, create a profile, and hope something happens.
Hopefully, PPA changes the game, as Pay-Per-Click is rapidly becoming a giant slot machine. It’s easy to put money in, and you get that occasional payout to keep you hooked, but in the end, the house is the only sure winner.
In the end, PPA is the way to go because it is more measurable for the client than anything else. PPA simplifies the whole mess and paranoia of click fraud with PPC also.
PPA seems like an OK idea for the content network, because the content network sucks in terms of ROI and scalability, and conversion-by-site results up until very recently have been opaque to the user.
PPA seems like a poor idea for Search, because overall, Google does a great job of making conversion and thus ROI tracking easy for everyone. If a keyword doesn’t work for you, then bail on it.
PPA transfers conversion risk to the publisher, which is silly. The publisher (Google, or Google search network partners) has done their job if they deliver a click based on a certain keyword and ad message. There are a ton of companies who don’t know how to convert clicks into revenue, and the publisher should not have to suffer because of it. (Of course there are also a ton of companies that don’t know how to pick relevant keywords, write good ads, and structure solid PPC campaigns – those folks are the ones that lose money on search, and of course publishers would never make money w/ these sorts of companies on PPA anyway.)
Advertisers that run successful businesses would never want to do PPA, since that puts the control (of volume, etc.) in the hands of the publisher. Solid advertisers will want to control the spigot (read: volume) based on their own metrics.
There is certainly no harm done here though. This will just never be a big slice of the pie (except maybe for content, which is not search and which therefore sucks).