PPA Advertising

Google today announced its new 'pay per Action' advertising product today.

Advertisers will need to pay only for completed actions that they can define, like submitting a request, filling a form, buying a product etc. This will make the entire ad world a lot more complicated. It will not be sufficient for google to monitor clicks now. They will also need to know what the user does after clicking on the ad.
The advertiser will need to report these actions back to Google.

Now ofcourse the advertiser has an incentive to not report these actions as he will need to pay for the same. But Google can effectively counter this by ranking the ad based on profitability to Google and value of each click to the advertiser.

Now all this makes sense in say a country like the US, where purchasing something online has become the order of the day.

In a country like india for example. Online sales are still not very common. Even the most tech savvy indian would prefer to check the product out online and then go down to the store, examine the product and then purchase it.

Online advertising in India, has never been the most attractive of options. As an advertiser, all you could expect from an 'online ad' is only visibility and mindshare and not an actual purchase online.

This being the case PPA is an attractive option from the advertisers perspective, as in most cases an advertiser in india is not looking for anything more than visibility. No 'action' is expected online.

So if given a choice they would gladly jump for PPA ads to CPC ads any day.

So is google taking a big risk here? Or do they have the wares to ensure that advertisers dont get what they want without paying a dime for it.

Techcrunch has a well written article describing the impact this could have on the advertising world.