As I logged into my Google AdWords account this morning I was greeted by a new message  from Google. The message read,

“The pay-per-action beta will be discontinued the last week of August 2008. After this date, your pay-per-action campaigns and ads will no longer be active.”

This comes right after Google announced its new Google Affiliates program (which is just a rebranding of Performics) and seems to confirm the rumors that Google would be shutting down their PPA beta in favor of a single solution through Google Affiliates. I personally think that the PPA program was underwhelming for most advertisers and publishers. It really seemed like they hacked the AdWords platform to offer a watered down affiliate system for AdWords users, so in the end this will probably be for the better. However, they’ll have to link it into AdWords if they really want it to take off.