Ad pricing for ad buyers is at the same time both very simple and very complicated. Out of the main three types of ad pricing models, two of them are very favourable to ad buyers, and the third has its charms too.
The main three ad pricing models for ad buyers
CPC campaigns are great if you want to drive traffic to your site. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad, so it’s a low-risk way of advertising. It’s also low complexity, meaning that for most advertisers it’s an easy first port of call.
CPA campaigns are great if you are trying to drive sales. You only pay when an ad leads to a sale, which makes them seem like an absolute no brainer – you give a website money, and they generate even more money for you! As they are so advantageous to ad buyers, they can be difficult to get onto sites in the first place.
This leaves CPM campaigns, which are great if you are trying to improve brand awareness. You only pay when your ad has been shown 1,000 times. If you put your ads on the right sites, this can be a great way of making people think more about your brand, with the added bonus of driving traffic and perhaps sales as well.
If you have a strong enough advertising campaign, then CPM can be the way to go to drive either traffic or sales anyway, as you can use the promise of cash to leverage websites into trying harder for you than they will for either CPA or CPC campaigns. This is because there is no upper limit to how well a CPM campaign performs for you, and so if a publisher wants to get repeat business from you they may optimise your campaigns incredibly well.
Other ad pricing models for ad buyers
So with these three ad campaigns having so much potential why would an ad buyer look into other ad pricing models? Well, that’s because other ad models have grown to provide the best value for specific goals.
Each come with their own level of complexity, and therefore are best managed by ad agencies and run through third-party ad servers. This means that each one comes with a higher price to just get going than CPM or CPC.
If you have the cash to invest however and are looking to generate leads, increase app downloads or video views, then there is a pricing model for you. Specialising will generally lead to better results, and as long as your ROI is positive, then this is the way to go.
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