Google’s continuing diversification

Emily Riley | March 20, 2007, 08:45 PM

It’s been known that Google has been thinking about the best way to offer CPA for a while, but it looks like they are getting closer. They announced a limited rollout of a beta test today (article.)

Although a pay-per-action model shifts more risk to publishers, since they don't get paid unless a visitor clicks and completes the pre-defined conversion, the payoff will usually be higher than CPC commissions, said Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google's ad products.

The move is one step closer to what many veteran CPA networks have already started offering advertisers, deep lead quality measurement and publisher-by-publisher quality scoring, which in turn determines individual site payouts. How soon Google takes this next step will depend on the quality of the publishers in the AdSense network and the relative sophistication of the CPA advertisers.

ClickZ also covered another Google announcement this week, of a different sort. They just purchased AdScape Media, a pretty small player in in-game advertising (which is a pretty small section of the market as is.) Google has yet to successfully corner the rich brand-based ad market; their video option has been met with lukewarm reviews. That said, mastering in game ad-serving technology would not be the hard part for Google.