Posted by Bart on March 26, 2011
This is an article by the Google Adsense team giving advices to increase Cost Per Click for the Adsense ads published on your website:
Excerpt:
DOs:
* Enable all of your ad units to show both text and image/rich media ads. By increasing the number of advertisers competing for your ad units, the ad auction will make sure that the highest paying ad will be shown.
* Keep your filter list small so you don’t lower your revenue potential by blocking the highest-paying ads.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Bart on November 25, 2010
When we think Online Advertising we think Banners and Buttons. But Text Links are a very important part of online advertising, and even more now that Google and other Search Engines have developed the “sponsored results” and other text placements.
Text Links are not as visible as images and may not catch the visitors eyes as easily. However they integrate perfectly in the website and visitors may not even notice that they are actually advertising placements.
The message with Text Links has to be shorter and therefore more accurate, more straight to the point.
Text Links are usually used for Cost Per Click or Cost Per Lead/Action, but not for Cost Per Impression.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 16, 2010
Let’s start with a few definitions:
From Wikipedia:
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, where advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system.
Cost per click (CPC) is the sum paid by an advertiser to search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on their advertisement which directs one visitor to the advertiser’s website.
From Google AdSense webpage (definition of the CPC from a Publisher point of view):
The cost-per-click (CPC) is the amount you earn each time a user clicks on your ad. The CPC for any ad is determined by the advertiser; some advertisers may be willing to pay more per click than others, depending on what they’re advertising.
From Google AdWords webpage (definition of the CPC from an Advertiser point of view):
This is the amount you’ll actually pay for a click on your ad — no more than the maximum bid you specify for your ad group, keyword or placement. The AdWords Discounter automatically gives you the lowest possible price in order for you to maintain your ad’s position.
Cost Per Click is a Pay Per Performance model: The more efficient the website is to deliver clicks to the ad, the more the publisher will get paid. It is a model that shares the risk between advertisers and publishers, and that’s why it has become so popular.
Cost Per Click is fair: “I pay you if your visitors clicks on my ad (which means that they are the good target to my products/services), whatever happens afterward, because what happens next is my responsibility as an Advertiser“.
Cost Per Click has been widely developed and promoted by Google with Google AdSense and Google AdWords, but it has been in used long before. What Google brought in was the Bid-Based Cost Per Click and the placement of contextual ads (ads targeting the website content) to optimize the ad placements on a website.
There are two primary models of PPC:
- Flat-rate PPC: In the flat-rate model, the advertiser and publisher agree upon a fixed amount that will be paid for each click. In many cases the publisher has a rate card that lists the CPC within different areas of their website or network. These various amounts are often related to the content on pages, with content that generally attracts more valuable visitors having a higher CPC than content that attracts less valuable visitors. However, in many cases advertisers can negotiate lower rates, especially when committing to a long-term or high-value contract.
Example: US$ 1.00 CPC means that the advertiser will pay 1 US dollar to the publisher for each click on its ad. If the Advertiser buys 1,000 clicks, the campaign will stop when reaching this amount of click. The total cost will be 1,000 US dollars.
- Bid-based PPC: In the bid-based model, the advertiser signs a contract that allows them to compete against other advertisers in a private auction hosted by a publisher or, more commonly, an advertising network. Each advertiser informs the host of the maximum amount that he or she is willing to pay for a given ad spot (often based on a keyword), usually using online tools to do so. The auction plays out in an automated fashion every time a visitor triggers the ad spot.
With Bid-based PPC the advertiser doesn’t know how much he is going to pay for a click, but he knows how much he will pay at the maximum.
Bid-based PPC is mainly used by Search Engines, such as Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter, while Content Websites and Affiliate Networks use the flat-rate PPC.
Click Fraud
The main issue with the PPC model is the fraud: Fake clicks are being performed by people who have no interest in the ad they are clicking on. In cheap labor cost countries, it’s easy to pay people to click on websites just to make money from the PPC.
Agencies and networks have developed system that control and limit the click fraud, by analyzing the click source, the click frequency, etc.
PPC is a good model for advertisers who want visitors or members to their website, rather than customers or subscribers.
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!
Posted by Bart on November 6, 2010
Ok, I guess everyone knows what a click (or point-and-click) is. But let just refresh your memory and see why clicks are useful for Online Advertising.
A click is the action of a computer user moving a mouse’s cursor to a certain location on a screen and then pressing one of the mouse’s buttons (usually the left one). A click will cause an event such as opening a folder, loading a new web page, downloading a file, etc.
A double-click is when the mouse’s button is quickly pressed twice. It usually causes a different event from the single-click.
In Online Advertising, there is no double-click. It’s always a click, or single-click. One may click on a banner, a text link, a video, etc.
For Email Marketing, we count a click each time an Internet user clicks on one of the elements in the email that he just received.
Click is important for Online Advertising, because it allows tracking and it’s also a payment model: Cost Per Click (CPC)
More about Online Advertising? Visit the Training page!