Commentary
Get What You Pay For And Pay For What You Get...Or: How I Learned To Stop Targeting And Love The Results
- by Mason Wiley , January 6, 2009
"Finish all your dinner," my Mom used to tell me. "Or you can't be a member of the clean plate club." Not wasting food earned me not only membership in that private collective, but also the reward
that went with it, namely dessert.
Anyone raised by Depression-era-born parents was indoctrinated …
7 comments about "Get What You Pay For And Pay For What You Get...Or: How I Learned To Stop Targeting And Love The Results ".
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Hear, hear! At the end of the day, results are what matter. With CPM the advertiser bears all the risk for what is or isn't a quality audience or placement, with painfully asymmetric information. CPC is better, but CPA is ideal -- at least as far as an advertiser is concerned.
Of course, CPA brings you straight into the middle of post-click marketing -- the landing experiences that respondents are given upon making that first click. While getting quality clicks is certainly an important variable into that equation, a greater portion of the outcome is dependent on the quality, creativity, and continuity of that experience -- and ultimately the value delivered to the respondent.
I think the industry as a whole is waaaay overdue to focus more on post-click marketing. Whether or not publishers can/should/will share responsibility for that is an interesting question.
Great article. Since the mid 90s, I'd pushed for publishers to use ad load instead of page view as the standard for ad impression, clearly with little success. It now seems publishers will be forced to adopt the CPA model or risk either facing a backlash from privacy advocates, or losing revenue to competitors who are willing to offer a CPA pricing model.
Great points, and now is absolutely the time to get in on CPA models. As the industry moves, the actual CPA a company pays will continue to increase (ala AdWords over the past 4 years) and networks/publishers will have even greater ability to pick and choose their advertisers (and prices).
CPA definitely alleviates any risk for marketers, but what's in it for publishers? Without audience targeting techniques at their disposal, what's a publisher to do to monetize perishable ad impression inventory...? The online advertising ecosystem depends on both marketers and publishers getting value out of the exchange
Disclosure: I work for a CPM network. That said, there are brand sensitivity risks for marketers - not technologists like Gates or Googlers - when buying CPA that are undeniable. I agree the model will ride a successful wave this year, but worth mentioning that countless Fortune brands wouldn't think to buy CPA owing to these risk factors. I could list several URLs off the top of my head that compromise the integrity of commercial brands that have been around for decades...worth noting.
All of you who remember CPI and the reasons why publishers would not comply please sit down. Outside of an online ability to count time encountered per click on, there are unmeasurable impressions a publisher produces for a client. See your PR departments for details before you sit down, too. Then there's that little thing of proof that someone did or did not click on a site directly because of a certain number of impressions. While all of this measuring is in progress, all of you who are left standing, please include how publishers can meet their financial obligations so they can provide you content for your CPA. In other words, this is not quite as direct as it counts.
While I concur that CPA is preferable to CPC, I'm still not sure that the label "risk-free" is warranted. Last data I saw was that a good click-through rate was 0.3% online and as high as 3% on mobile. While it might make sense to only pay for the 3-30 people who clicked-through and made it into the 'acquisition' bucket, what about the 970-997 people who (at best) simply ignored your ad (zero out-of-pocket cost under CPA), but who may also have been p***ed off with your online ad?
Recently here in Australia my home-page site was 'taken-over' by an incessant half-screen pop-up every time I hit the home page. The first time was very annoying, the next time was extremely annoying and by the third time I vowed never to buy or consume that brand. Because I did NOT click (apart from 'close' when I eventually found the microscopic well-hidden close button) on the ad I don't count in the metrics. With click-through rates as low as reported there could very well be more audience on the negative side of the ledger that are not being accounted for than on the positive side of the ledger!