Google pushes $1 PPA bounty
Who says the “new” Google Pay-Per-Action (PPA) pricing model “beta” announced this week is a test, or even that it is new!
Once again, Google is its own best (non-paying) AdWords/AdSense customer, self-dealing Google product and service pitches in competition with paying AdWords clients.
The Google AdSense blog on Google Checkout $1 PPA bounty for AdSense publishers:
We're excited to announce that in addition to AdSense, AdWords, Firefox with Google Toolbar, and Google Pack, you can now refer your users to Google Checkout through AdSense.
Every time you refer a user to Google Checkout, you make a little money:
1) You place the Checkout referral button on your site,
2) Someone clicks on the button, signs up as a buyer with Google Checkout using a valid U.S. credit card, and completes a purchase of at least $10 before shipping and tax through Checkout within 90 days.
3) You earn $1.
The Google PPA FAQ invites “beta testers” to throw budgetary caution to the wind, and in Google’s direction:
Your daily budget should only be constrained by physical inventory limits. We encourage you to set your daily budget as high as possible.
Google, of course, doesn’t have to budget anything to serve its Google Checkout referral pitches to “content partners.“
Paying AdWords customers are advised, however:
Only you can decide how much you want to pay for your pay-per-action advertising. You determine how much you're willing to offer for each specific action to be completed on your site, whether it's $5 for a purchase or $1 for a newsletter sign-up. You can also control your spending by setting a daily budget.
The daily budget that you set controls how often your pay-per-action ad will appear on publisher websites, and when it will stop being displayed within publishers' accounts for them to select and place on their websites. Once your daily budget has been met on any day, your ad should no longer appear on publisher's sites, and we will prevent it from being selected by publishers.
In hawking its own Google Checkout, Google not only serves itself up free advertising, it has unlimited access to the real Google cash register for financing the PPA bounties, as I discuss in “Google Checkout is a loser, really.”
The unsustainable as a stand-alone payment processing service that is Google’s Checkout profits from multi million dollar Googley subsidies.