Author: Bill Gerba on 2006-07-04 00:11:41
While many in our industry were focusing on of retail media measurement during these past few weeks, Google was busy thinking about how to measure media effectiveness as they deployed a new pay-per-action / cost-per-acquisition advertising experiment. Since we're frequently forced to use measurements of reach and recall as a proxy for ad effectiveness (since that's often all that we have), it would seem like the search giant's experiment could be a more accurate and direct way of calculating ROI for a particular message or campaign, which is really what we need to be looking at, in my opinion.
bank to throw at any problem that they find interesting. But for all of that, the thing I find most compelling about the new technology being tested in Google's Labs is its elegance and simplicity. Instead of billing by impressions (as Yahoo! and others did in the old days), or clickthroughs (as Google and most others do now), they'll instead bill by actions. Participating websites will display contextually relevant ads similar to what Google has used in the past. Only now, these AdSense partners will not receive payment for an impression or clickthrough unless the visitor completes some critical action, whether it be filling out a form, completing a purchase, or something else altogether. In this way, Google's clients - the advertisers - only pay for ads that generate revenue or conversions for them, essentially creating a gigantic affiliate marketing network, like ValueClick's Commission Junction on steroids. (In fact, one writer theorizes that Google CPA spells the demise of ValueClick.) While this technology will likely become commonplace on the Internet fairly soon, I'm also excited by the possibility of eventually seeing a large-scale system like this deployed for various in-store media, like kiosks and digital signs. Full Article
