CPC OR CPM?
TweetShould you worry about “clicks” or “impressions”? Something online advertisers are always concerned about. Well, you must be concerned about both.
Both actions are challenging when it comes to online ad performance, optimizing your ad to generate the maximum and targeted impressions and clicks ending to achieving the campaign goals is a daunting task.
Your advertisement performance is measured by:
- Impression
- Click/Action
- Drop off
- Bounce back
In this article I will focus on “clicks” and “Impressions” without getting too technical. Reasons users are likely to click on an ad are:
- Relevancy
- Targeting
- Visual Expression
- Enticing & clear message
“Click” is not the end of it; the process continues after the user lands on your website, there the “click” must generate a particular conversion that you have specified, could be purchasing a product or a service, subscribing to a magazine, completing a survey and so on… so you need to bear in mind that worrying about “clicks” means worrying about conversions. To achieve conversions certain measures needs to be taken care of before launching an advertisement anywhere. On top of those measures are:
- Relevant & Consistent message: the message on the display banner must be consistent with the one on the ad landing page, often display ads lead to the homepage of a website instead of a specific landing page; so the user gets lost in the message, and finds no clear meaning to link to the message on the advertisement, this will lead to a high dropout rate. Your message must be persuasive and clear; it also must set and meet user’s expectation.
- Clear conversion path: whatever your conversion path is, you must make it clear; it is like leaving bread crumbs “or mini carrot cupcakes if your user is me” to the place you want the user to go to. Your path must be easy and leading to a result.
- Incentives: it will encourage the user to engage with your website if you offer him something, could be a discount or winning any sort of reward or a carrot cupcake!
- Ad targeting: on top of taking all the measures to optimize your ad for higher clicks and conversions, the initial placement of the advertisement is key to the success, the more targeted an ad is the better and genuine the results are.
A study by Borrell Associates forecasts 60% growth of display ads in 2011, “They’re not buying mass anymore; they’re buying niche,” said Borrell. So the display targeted ads are the popular choice, targeting can be from geographic locations to a more sophisticated targeting, time of the day, frequency capping, content relevancy, and even more personalized targeting.
An “Impression” is not less demanding than a “click”, to convert an impression into a click also takes similar efforts, from relevancy to consistency of messages, setting up the conversion path and so on.
It is important to mention that regardless of clicks; the impression will be made on the user the instant he downloads the page and sees your ad banner. Once the impression is registered on the server it will also register in user’s brain; even if the user is not with an eidetic memory, still the visuals will be retained in his subconscious and will be triggered later in the course of online actions and experiences. There is something called the mind’s eye, the ability of our brains to retrieve a visual they have seen. So the likeliness of this user to come back and click the ad is high, if that ad really made the impression, by using the earlier measures we spoke about.
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Definitions:
CPC: click per action which in “Clicking” on the banner, this is pricing model
CPM: Click Per impression is the Cost per thousand impressions pricing model
Impression: An online advertisement impression is a single appearance of an advertisement on a web page
Click: is the interaction with an ad banner by clicking the ad.
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