Sunday, March 25, 2007

Google's PPA Test

Google recently announced that they have launched a Pay Per Action (PPA) beta. Most of Google's revenue comes from their Pay Per Click (PPC) model. Google therefore must have analyzed how the PPA model would affect their ad revenues.
Advertisers are not concerned about how much they pay per click, they do however care about how much they pay per action. An action can be defined as a lead, a sale, a pageview, etc. Most large advertisers already track the cost per action (CPA) and use optimization software or services to hit their CPA goals.
Google's PPA model will therefore affect a number of middlemen, including companies that specialize in lead generation. Google's PPA model will also impact Google's revenue in the short term. The PPA model serves to reduce inefficiencies in PPC model. However, over the long term Google is assuring advertisers that they can bid for only for revenue events that effect them and let Google manage the rest.
For now, this beta is only on Google's Content network (not on Google search). This will help advertisers concerned about click fraud on the content network.
Overall, the announcement is a positive step, one just wonders when Google will roll it out as a broader program and how it will affect Google's revenue.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Bjork Concert in May

Successfully logged on to Ticketmaster this morning when the tickets for the Bjork concert in Mountain View, CA went on sale at 10am PST. Got them tickets!
Really looking forward to seeing her live when she's here in May. Also looking forward to her new album called "Volta". From interviews I get a sense she is back to her rhythmic basics.

Testing Blogger

Just before I stick to Blogger as my blogging platform, I thought I'd test something else out. I checked out WordPress. I've played around with it before and at first it seems like it has a lot more features at first. But it took a little while to figure out. Some features like categories and stats seems very cool. But it looks like you can achieve stats with Blogger using Google Analytics (just add a quick snippet of code to the Blog template).
I like how Google provides so many different features. It would help if they were more tightly integrated. But, its great for now. It took me seconds to sign up for Google AdSense account (putting AdSense ads on my blog page) for my Blogger page. If you want to upload picture or other documents you could use Picasa or Google Pages respectively. It looks like there's a lot of nifty widgets for Blogger too and I'm going to have fun playing around with them.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

My first post

I've never really had the time to be an active blogger. Though I do follow a number of tech blogs on a regular basis (Love Google Reader!). But I've decided its time to get more disciplined and start writing on technology. I have recently started working in the search marketing industry, a quickly evolving industry that will hopefully give me ideas to write about.
I also love music. I'm looking forward to watching Bjork when she comes around the Bay Area - and need to get my tickets this Saturday. Also got tickets for the upcoming Arcade Fire show in Berkeley. Yipee!!
So hopefully there'll be lots more of these posts to come. One things for sure, it'll help me write down all these crazy thoughts in my mind!