Friday, January 25, 2008

CPA Vs CPC & CPM

Over the years Internet Advertisement has witness tremendous growth with more and more advertisers jumping into the fray. Online ad models like the CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), and CPC (Cost Per Click) becomes a huge hit among millions of advertisers. However, along with the guaranteed benefits, there are certain risks still in question with these models.

First it was the CPM model that draws the attention of the advertising community. The model is a great tool to obtain certain predefined amount of clicks, but the guarantee of actual conversion is undefined and advertisers are at their own risk.

Again the reigning CPC model, which brings unlimited amount of clicks have earned tremendous success in the online ad market. But then it also involves certain risks. Even though the advertisers have the freedom to choose and compare their bids for better conversion results, the click fraud issue is a major concern here. Effective measures have been implemented by major search Engines to curb this issue, but advertisers are still open to the click fraud harm.

The CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) model, however, seems to offer the best guarantee for advertisers. It offers the advantage of getting clicks that really converts. Also there is no click fraud risk involved here as the advertisers have to pay only for those clicks that return value for their ads. So for the advertisers the CPA model seems to be a better option in terms of curbing unnecessary ad spends while making sure that ads were being displayed only when they are most likely to convert.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Time to Upgrade Google Analytics Tracker

For AdWords Advertisers using Google Analytics tool, it’s time to upgrade their old analytics tracking system with the new and more advanced version, which has been made available to all Google account holders recently. The new analytics tracker namely “ga.js” is a complete javascript rewrite that succeeds the existing old version “urchin.js”. One can go through the Google Analytics Migration Guide PDF for detail reference.

The new tracking version has brought many updates to Google Analytics system, while making advanced features accessible in a much better way. For example, one can track the performance of a webpage on multiple Google Analytics account. Like sites with user generated contents can be able to integrate their authors' Google Analytics IDs alongside the company’s own tracking account.

It also enables you to check and analyze how your AdWords traffic compares with your site’s average or how one conversion goal compares to another over time, and more ...

Monday, January 14, 2008

Google’s Conversion Optimizer Now Out of Beta

The Google Conversion Optimizer is out of its beta test. It’s now available to qualified advertisers worldwide. For advertisers, whose Ad campaigns have enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking and received a minimum of 200 conversions within the last 30 days. The good thing is advertisers no longer have to manually adjust their bids to reach their CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) goals.

Launched in September, 2007, this advanced AdWords tool is intended to enhance advertisers’ ad value by automatically finding the most optimal bids for an ad auction. The Conversion Optimizer calculates the optimal CPC bids by using the conversion history of a given search query, location of the user, and conversion history of particular sites in the Content Network.

Though there are certain features that are not compatible with Conversion Optimizer like placement targeting, position preference, etc. , the best part is that the tool is being seen as a real time saver by automatically showing only those ads that are most likely to convert.