In the web era, traditional media are struggling to renew themselves and are faced with a situation where audiences and advertisers are scarce.
New media and information technologies have put the advertising world in a constant state of change.
In addition to changing user behaviour, advertisers have turned to much more advantageous and democratic advertising methods.
Cost per click, or CPC, is responsible for this, as it is considered the best strategy for most advertisers. After all, most advertisers are looking to generate traffic.
The bidding
First of all, let's talk about the auction in general, for example, on Google Ads, we bet an amount to access a defined audience and often we put a maximum CPC on it.
It is simple to understand, easy to deploy and the results are direct. The highest bid wins the printing of its ad.
The results
The results are simple since the CPC is closely linked to the traffic generated by the digital campaign.
If the objective of your campaign is to generate traffic to your website, it is best to choose media that offer a CPC strategy, such as Google Ads.
There are other price models, but they correspond to other objectives. Some pricing models offer an advantage to the media, others to advertisers, it is linked to risk. The CPC offers a risk shared between the advertiser and the media.
If your goal is to generate sales or leads, choose a cost per acquisition model, or CPA.
The CPC can also be used for lead generation and/or sales.
If you are able to optimize the conversion rate of your website, the CPC allows you to more easily define the performance of your ads, because it is easier to assign a monetary value to a visit to a website than to a view of an ad.
For example, if the CPC is $2 and your website has an average conversion rate of 5%, your final CPA is $40.
Unlike CPM where advertisers even pay for ads that don't work, CPC ensures that you only pay for real clicks on your ad.
The control
Whether you use Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads or LinkedIn Ads, you will often have to choose an auction strategy, such as CPC, but also endless targeting options.
The CPC allows to have a unit of comparison between the different advertising options and channels and to adjust the bids, in order to favour or disadvantage certain variables.
For example, with Google Ads, you can adjust bids on keywords, device, geolocation, location, audience, etc.
This control makes it possible, among other things, to better use and distribute the budget allocated to the campaign.
Interested in learning more?
Parkour3 offers Google Ads (Adwords) training for those who would like to know more about web marketing activation.