When you work at a new search engine, one question you constantly encounter is, "So, what makes Snap different?" Over the course of dozens of such conversations, I've discovered that search engine users are most intrigued by the "visual search" portion of my answer: they like the idea of being able to see and browse through Websites instead of just text links. However, for search engine advertisers and marketers, while the visual search results are cool, it's the Cost-Per-Action segment of my (now fairly rehearsed) speech that gets their attention.

And that's because Cost-Per-Action (CPA) removes one major problem inherent in most paid search advertising: click fraud.

“Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click.” – Wikipedia Article, April 2006

In a Cost-Per-Click model, advertisers and traffic partners both have an incentive to engage in click fraud: advertisers to deplete their competitor’s advertising funds, and publishing partners to increase revenue due to paid clicks.

Cost-Per-Action eliminates click-fraud by removing the incentive to click on listings, since there is no charge to advertisers and no revenue shared with traffic partners for clicks. Instead, in a CPA model, the incentive is for the most relevant and useful results to be presented to users, since the publisher only receives revenue from the advertiser in the event of a successful sale or other advertiser defined action by a user after arriving at the advertiser’s site.

While CPA has been called everything from "The Holy Grail" of paid search to merely wishful thinking by SNAP, with the risk that as many as 20% of paid clicks are fraudulent, Cost-Per-Action is rapidly gaining a fan base. The Blog will stay on top of this issue and we'll see how it shakes out.