Google announced today 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. Since the initial launch of the pay-per-action advertising beta in March 2007, many advertisers who have used the new pricing model are pleased with the opportunity to have more ways to promote their products and services online.

“Pay-per-action advertising helped our company make the most of our marketing budget,” said Alexandre Douzet, Executive Vice President and General Manager, TheLadders.com, the leading $100k+ job search web site and an early adopter of Google’s pay-per-action advertising model. “At TheLadders.com, we are big proponents of marketing efficiency, so the ability to supplement our existing cost-per-click campaigns with a model that rewards qualified leads makes a lot of sense to us.”

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. Publishers in the Google content network who want greater control over the ads shown on their sites may select between individual ads, a shopping cart of ads, or a specific keyword that is relevant to their site’s content. These publisher-selected ad units contain only pay-per-action ads, and therefore, they do not compete in the auction against CPC or CPM-based ads, which are served in separate AdSense for content ad units.

With this new pricing model, both advertisers and publishers gain more precision and control over their efforts to effectively spend advertising budgets and deliver relevant ads to related website content. Pay-per-action advertising is now available to qualifying advertisers worldwide.

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