PPA - Pay Per Action is the new mantra of online advertising that is being preached by Google. It does sound interesting and more bang for your money. But is it really or not? Well compared to banner ads and ad impressions, PPC - Pay Per Click turned out to be far better. Same way PPA is definitely better than PPC. Just like we thought PPC will give us the desired results and then we found there are people who would love to do PPC fraud and cheat you of your hard earned advertising dollars. I fear the same is going to happen with PPA where some smarties out there will come up with another way of frauding you of your customer referral fees. There will be some advertiser willing to pay more than the cost of the product to sign up customers through PPA and there you go. The whole world will buy his product, make some additional money then they actually spent and they turn around and resell the same product for actual cost or lower thereby recovering their entire spending. May be in this case, the advertiser will actually be still left with a paying customer. This can still be beneficial if the product has a recurring revenue stream for the seller.

There are very few players in PPA market currently. Google has only launched Beta for PPA and has already closed taking in more Beta users for PPA. What is different about PPA is that MSN, Yahoo, Ask and others are yet to get on this bandwagon. They are watching it closely but not sure if they should enter this space. They had hard enough time getting their PPC right. Although Yahoo made some attempts recently to improvise its PPC by paying back its advertisers for PPC fraud.

So what is this PPA? PPA as the name suggests is where you pay the search engine or the portal/affiliate/website a hefty fees when you actually make revenues from the customer who clicks on your ad, comes to your site and completes a purchase. Although you pay fewer times, each time you pay, you pay big commissions. PPA is more like affiliate or resellership rather than PPC which is still referral advertising at the most. Example: EasyStoreHosting is an ecommerce solution provider whose solution costs $300 per year. EasyStoreHosting.com is ready to pay its entire annual fees of $300 as commission or PPA fees for each sale that search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, HotBot, Ask, Acoona, DogPile and other can bring to its kitty. Of course, each of these search engines will have to show 100s of thousands of ESH's ad impressions on its site and hope a few thousand will click on it and a few tens of them who actually click will finally make a purchase for search engines to make some good revenues.

Jury is still out on PPA. Will it succeed? It is a great thing for Sellers. Question is will search engines, portals, websites, content networks etc embrace Pay Per Action like they embraced Adsense and Adwords. That remains to be seen and time as always will tell its story. This time around it is something in favour of Advertisers and Sellers. For their sake, we hope it does succeed.

Surya Prakash Loonker