Last week Google launched Pay Per Action in beta version for some AdSense publishers and AdWords advertisers. I logged into my Google AdSense account this morning, and noticed that my referrals section was redone to allow me to start placing Google Pay Per Action referrals on my site.
Below I will take you through a screen by screen view of Pay Per Action from the Google AdSense publisher side of things.
Choose Referral Locale:
When I clicked on the referrals link within the AdSense Setup screen I saw a new option to “Choose Referral Locale.” As you can see from the screen capture below, I selected “English,” which then took me to the next step.
Choose Referrals:
The next screen is where I can select either “Google referrals” or “All referrals.” Google referrals currently consist of Google AdSense, Google AdWords, Google Checkout, Firefox plus Google Toolbar and Google Pack. The “all referrals” link shows me hundreds of different referrals broken down by category.
The categories available include Autos, Business-to-Business, Consumer Products, Entertainment, Finance, Insurance, Travel and Vacations, and Technology and software. You can also search for referral products by product name or keyword.
You can also see that on the right hand side is a section that shows you your “Ad Shopping Cart.” The Ad Shopping Cart has a summary all the referrals you selected; we will get to this later. Here is a screen capture of the “choose referrals” page.
By clicking on “all referrals” you are first presented with Google referrals followed by referrals ordered alphabetically. Here is a screen shot of that page.
In the example below, I checked off the Salesforce.com referral product and then I am presented three different text ad types, in the form of a banner ad. The action required to earn the $38.46 is “Sign up for a free trial through the demo center.” Here is a screen capture:
I then did some more browsing and landed on a image ad from Share Builder that paid $38.46 but the “action” required to earn the money says “N/A.” So I have no idea when I would get paid if someone clicked on that ad. Here is a screen capture:
Choose Referral Options:
The next step is to choose the referral options, which consist of selecting the ad block format (sometimes this won’t be an option, depending on the types of ads you picked), selecting a color for the text ads and specifying a channel. Here is a screen capture:
Get Referral Code:
Finally I am presented with the referral code to place on my site. So here is the live referral code that should rotate between three different Pay Per Action ads. Yes, you can click on them and yes I can tell you to click on them. I can even encourage you to sign up, since these are not part of the contextual product offering from Google, they have different program policies.
Here it is:
Looking good, but I see plenty of room for improvement on the management side. Of course, this is just an early beta at this time.