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Main » 2013 » December » 09 » Impressions, Clicks, Leads, Sales
12:10 PM Impressions, Clicks, Leads, Sales |
| Impressions, Clicks, Leads, Sales Recently someone asked a question that made me
realize that most folks haven�t been around the 'net as several models for
selling advertising were attempted. This primer should help everyone understood
all of the terminology that goes into selling advertising.Let�s start with the
word �impressions�. This is a model of selling advertising where you pay for
each person that sees an ad. So in television and radio, they periodically do
surveys to try to figure out how many people watch a particular channel at a
particular time. The most well-known is probably the �Neilson� ratings. Then the
television and radio stations sell advertising based on how many thousand people
are probably watching a particular commercial.Rates are usually expressed in
�CPM� which stands for �Cost Per Thousand�. Yes; I and every advertising
executive on the planet knows that �M� isn�t the first letter in �thousand�, but
�M� is the roman numeral for one thousand. So, if you call a radio station and
ask for their rates, they might say that their standard prime-time rate is
$10/CPM. That means you will pay 1 cent for each person who hears the ad� or
$10.00 for every 1,000 people. If you advertise a single commercial during a
time when 80,000 people are listening, you would expect to pay $800.That leads
us to one of the current favorite models� PPC (or pay-per-click). This trend
started when banner advertising was still in it�s hey day and before it was
discovered that text ads actually did better than animated graphic ads. It has
continued to this day although many networks did ban it because of fraud years
ago. Google actually even started out selling by the impression and then
converted to selling by the click. However, most of us who went through that
transition understand that internally Google is still charging by the
impression. The PPC model they show outwardly is really just an illusion, but
perhaps that is a topic for another article.The pay-per-click (PPC) model
doesn�t exist outside of the Internet. This is the first and only model that
seems to not exist in the offline world. However, if you really analyze it�. it
does have a corresponding term in the offline world. It should be called a lead.
A lead is any time you get someone to raise their hand showing some interest.
That is what a click means. They are raising their hand and saying that they are
interested. You then show them a page that tries to get them to take a more
solid commitment (actually buying or possibly just giving their email address or
phone number so they can be contacted at a later time).Many moved to the PPC
model to get rid of the fraud with the impresison model. Of course it didn�t
work. It is just as easy to commit fraud with the click model. People being paid
to run ads on their site can click on their own ads. They can have friends do
it. They can even have robots do it through proxy servers. Clicking an ad is
just as easy as hitting the refresh button. The fraud problem hasn�t
disappeared. Many affiliate networks used to offer the PPC model, but dropped it
years ago due to this fraud problem. Commission Junction is perhaps the largest
network to no longer allow PPC. That brings us to the next level in the food
chain.As we have already discussed, a lead is when you get someone to show some
interest in your offer. In the off-line world, perhaps you ask them to send a
self-addressed, stamped envelope for more information� or to calll an 800
number� or to visit a web-site. That is a lead. They have viewed your ad (an
impression) and then taken some kind of action to show that they are interested.
A click is one form of a lead. However, in the online world, we generally call a
click a click and don�t call a lead a lead until they give us some contact
information. So in the offline world, if someone called an 800 number� that
would be a lead. However, in the online world, most people don�t think of it as
a lead when they just click� only when they provide some contact
information.Many affiliate networks (Commission Junction is one) still offer
programs where they pay per lead. You place ad code on your site and someone
clicks on it. You don�t get paid for that click. But if they click on it and
then fill out a form giving their contact information� then you get paid. They
haven�t actually bought anything, but they did show enough interest to give
their name and phone number (for instance) or their name and mailing address� or
perhaps just their email address. The more contact information, the more
valuable a lead is considered Turn your world for the remarkable alexander mcqueen scarf and let
it be another must have in your fashion conscious closet..The person who posted
the comment implied that selling leads is one way of dealing with click fraud.
Wrong. Of course they eliminate click fraud, but just like clicks elminated
impression fraud� leads just replace click fraud with lead fraud. It may be a
bit more difficult to fill out forms with false information, but the rewards are
also higher. If you are being paid 10 cents per click, you would generally be
paid $1 per lead. So the extra time to fill out the form is well compensated.
Lead fraud exists just as much as click fraud.That gets to the next term� the
highest level on the advertising food chain� the affiliate program. You are
being paid for sales in this model. This model is perhaps the most fraud-free,
but we haven�t looked at the other side of the equation yet. Fraud exists on
both sides of the equation in all of these shared systems. Let�s look at each of
these methods of selling advertising from both sides of the fence.There is the
advertiser and the publisher in any of these systems. The advertiser is the
person wanting more sales. The publisher is someone with traffic and wants
revenue from that traffic.With impressions, the advertiser has the least
guarantee of anything. They take all of the risk. The publisher promises only
that people will hear the ad.With clicks, the advertiser has at least a
guarantee that people will end up on their site (baring 100% fraud in which case
they are still guaranteed that at least robots will visit their site). The
publisher assumes some of the risk. They now have an incentive to help the
advertiser make their ad better so that it gets more clicks huanghaiyan251. The
shared responsibility is at a pretty good balance at this point. It is still the
advertisers sole responsibility to turn those clicks into leads or sales (and it
is usually the advertiser who should be most qualified at doing this, not the
publisher).With leads, the responsibility shifts very slightly even more toward
the publisher. They are now responsible for not only getting the advertisers ad
in front of people�s eyeballs and getting them to take the action to click� but
they are also responsible for getting them to give their contact
information.With sales, the advertiser gives up all responsibilty. It is now the
publishers responsibility to actually become the sales person. This can
sometimes be difficult because the publisher has no control over the sales page.
They have responsibility, but no authority. In this system, fraud is often being
committed on the other side. An advertiser can harvest that traffic to a lead
form or an untracked alternate payment method or an 800 number� and the
publisher never gets paid for the untracked sales.The same can happen with leads
of course, but the burden and the elements of fraud slightly shift the other
direction.If you really think it through, all of these methods of selling
advertising are really just semantics. Many advertisers and publishers choose
one and convert all of the others to that one method for comparison. I mentioned
earlier that Google appears to sell traffic by the click, but internally they
are really selling impressions. The same is true for many affiliate marketers.
They may sign up for CPA programs (where they are paid per click, lead or sale),
but internally they are calculating their earnings per impression and adjusting
what programs they promote based on that one metric.Fraud takes place regardless
of the model. The majority of that fraud shifts from publisher to advertiser or
vice-versa as you move from one model to another, but the actual amount of fraud
is a constant.So how do you decide which model to use when selling advertising?
One factor is to protect yourself from that fraud. If you want to sell by sales
(just putting up the affiliate link), you will be faced with the very highest
amount of fraud from the advertisers as a publisher. You will need to mitigate
this as best as you can by choosing the best networks and the most reliable
advertisers within that network (the best networks give you a metric for that�
Clickbank it is gravity� Commission Junction, it is CPC). In the end, I don�t
recommend it. It is a full time job managing that fraud.Leads moves back on the
food chain in your favor a bit. You can sell leads though one of those affiliate
networks or you can do it on your own. If you do it through an affiliate
network, you still have all of the same fraud issues from the advertiser side. I
don�t recommend that. If you do it on your own, you will have to find buyers for
your leads. Currently, this is not the standard method of doing business so
those who would be interested in buying leads aren�t doing searches on Google,
etc to find publishers. You will need to contact businesses directly. There are
many real estate agents, car dealerships, boat and RV dealerships, mortgage
lenders and others selling high dollar items that would be very interested in
buying your leads, but they won�t come looking for you. You have to call or
visit them. I�m not interested in that business model, but it is a very, very
lucrative model. If you are interested in getting on the phone or driving to
local folks of the above type� then by all means� investigate this model. I know
folks who are bringing in the high 7 figures with this model� but they do work
an awful lot of hours.Clicks moves back in the chain even more. People will come
to you looking for clicks. However, because the fraud now exists primarily on
the publisher side, they will be leary. You will have a very low conversion
ratio. However, if you deliver high quality traffic (ie: don�t put their ads on
the sites of others and share in the income� and don�t tell your customers where
they can find their ads� and therefore their competitors ads so they can click
on them)� if you do that, you will have loyal customers for life who will pay
for as many quality clicks as you can send them� month after month after month
for years to come. I still have my first traffic customer from over 6 years ago.
I have no doubt that they will remain a customer for as long as I follow that
policy of protecting them from click fraud from the publisher side.Impressions
moves even more in your favor and away from advertiser fraud. However, it moves
so far away that prospects are so leary they simply will not buy at all unless
you are very well known. For instance, wwwProBlogger.net (or even I could
probably do this on my blog) could potentially sell taffic by the impression.
The real estate on known high traffic blogs is valuable enough and they are high
enough profile that some advertisers would consider paying by the impression.
However, I wouldn�t recommend this in our current market. Selling by the click
is as far in the food chain as most potential advertisers are currently willing
to go. They are even leary there and would generally prefer moving the other
direction along that advertising food chain.
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