A senior Google executive has reportedly shared that the company is making moves towards cost-per-action (CPA) as a more ideal auction-based pricing model.

Published: 27 Aug 2007

A senior Google executive has reportedly shared that the company is making moves towards cost-per-action (CPA) as a more ideal auction-based pricing model.

According to Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search product and user experience,
the quest culminates in "the Holy Grail" of CPA. However, she admitted that goal
was a long way away, the company is in fact already testing a version through
its AdWords product.

This version of CPA lets advertisers pay Google "only when a certain marketing
goal is accomplished". According to experts, it means that someone pays when a
user completes a potentially larger and more involved transaction. Also, CPA
will likely involve larger sums of money being paid to Google than CPC.

In June this year, Google had announced the worldwide expansion of its
pay-per-action advertising beta.
Pay-per-action is a new pricing model that allows advertisers to pay only when
a pre-defined action is completed on their site, such as when a user makes a
purchase, signs up for a newsletter, or completes any other clearly defined
action.

The company had come up with the launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta
in March 2007.

As per the latest development, 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.