Snap.com back in the saddle

When it comes to online advertising, what's better than pay-per-click?

Time's up. It would definitely be "pay-per-purchase."

Enter Snap.com, relaunched by original pay-per-click model inventor Bill Gross. An article from Mercury News has the scoop, but there are a few things I'm considerably interested in right away. First is the preview-based interface in which you can not only view the web page title, URL and description, but the web page itself in a preview pane (which is also customizable). Secondly, the fact that the preview pane is interactive. You don't even have to leave Snap.com to browse and use the websites that come up in the search results. This seems very practical, and I think it will be a key feature of their search interface. Lastly is their Cost-Per-Action advertising model. The concept being that an advertiser only pays for their ad when a user clicks on it and completes a specified action on the landing page. I think this model has great potential because it gives much more meaning to ROI, although it will only be successful if advertisers can master the art of prospect conversion.