Under the radar, Google has been beta testing a CPA ad model that would enhance its current CPC model. Is this a good thing? It certainly is if you're an advertiser. With click fraud rates hovering around eighteen percent in recent months, CPC campaigns are making you spend on clicks that won't count (though you should certainly be accommodating for that in your budget, because click fraud is simply an unavoidable reality of advertising).

A CPA model still may come with some fraudulent accounts, don't kid yourself. If the CPA that you're offering is based on a lifetime model and higher than the cost of an initial purchase or a free registration into a lead database, expect fraud as well. However, most marketers will tell you that a CPA model that rewards advertisers for actual sign-ups or purchases is a much better friend to your ROI and marketing budget and generally produces a higher quality of lead.

However, for people who make money from Adsense or consider Adsense a key supplement to their website revenue stream, this is not great news! As any marketer knows on the flip side, it's much easier to get somebody to click an ad then to convert on the back end. Sure, CPA prices are higher than click costs, but can be much more difficult to generate, particularly if the product is expensive or the landing page creative isn't good.

It was fairly inevitable that at some point Google would offer a CPA deal. After all, many ad networks have been offering this model for a long time and advertisers flock to it. The question is, with the CPC model that's so engrained in advertisers and publishers alike with Adsense, will people want to, or even mentally be able to, transition? The program is still in beta, so we have a while until it's public, but it's food for thought if you're unhappy with the ROI on your Adsense campaign.