In Dell Computer’s revolutionary direct sales model, which altered the evolution of American business, component parts for building customer orders were purchased at or near the time of the order, reducing to near-zero inventory on hand and accelerating the company’s rise to profitability. Google is already pretty profitable in its own business, but today it confirmed rumors that it will experiment with an approach to advertising sales that Michael Dell might appreciate: a cost-per-action model where the advertiser pays when the sale is made.

While similar systems have been tried by Internet advertisers before, they’ve been on a far smaller scale. Google’s upcoming AdSense beta will give selected participants in the US the option of determining the value of a user’s action - such as paying for a download or signing up for a newsletter - triggered by an ad supplied through the Google AdSense network.

Rather than paying for the click (which may not result in a sale) or for the impression (which the customer might not even see), a beta advertiser may choose to pay for the “action,” which is an advertiser-defined point in which the customer’s sale is declared “converted.” (FULL DISCLOSURE: BetaNews is a Google AdSense partner.)

Publishers and media consultants today see this news as signaling a major Web transformation, but into what specifically is still being debated. Some foresee Google’s move as triggering a broader creation of what are called “sales funnels:” content intentionally designed to lead readers toward the trigger that generates the conversion, rather than simply placing the ad in its traditional leaderboard or skyscraper position.

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One key potential benefit some see is that sales funnels could effectively filter out click fraud - invalid clicks tracked by Google that would normally be chargeable to advertisers, though which aren’t really clicks made by human beings. In a recent report, Google said it believed as much as 10% of recorded clicks were not valid, and by way of voluntarily filtering them out, the company refrained from collecting an additional $1 billion in revenue.