Buying Efficiencies : Continued ... CPC (Cost per Click), digital marketing

Topic Continued : Media buying efficiencies : The Great CPC media...

I know this took a lot of time to come thru, but thrust me it will be worth the wait(weight for some).

So here's my take on getting efficiencies into CPC purchase. 

When you buy CPC in the market today, this is what it is sold as. 

1. It is the most effective media purchase.
2. It is like buying user engagement.
3. It is user engagement.
4. The user has better intent.
5. It's like buying on Google content network (Hehe Haha)
6. you just cant go wrong on this media currency purchase

Some of the things said above are to some extent true, but don't follow them blindly. 

The Catch 

1. Most of the media planner buy inventories of publisher reporting ( It is changing but not completely).
2. The Tech involved in tracking clicks on the advertiser side is non existent ( it is changing but the tracking used is crazily ineffective.)[I will explain this later]
3. Analytic are completely missing... post click or even the click itself.
4. There is this absurd rule prevalent in the market that click bought will result into visitors...[ Again I will explain this later]
5. Most of the clicks bought are on blind networks.... interestingly they do some crazy business in India.

So here is the explaining and how you can avoid yourself from falling into one of the sales pitches mentioned above and bring more efficiencies to your media plan. 

CPC is a good inventory to buy for sure, no doubt about it. It is cost effective, reliable and can be scaled up or down based on your media spend requirements and communication objectives. Having said that, please follow the some of the below mentioned rules of engagement while buying CPC inventory. 

1. Know the source of inventory. lots of time the planner does not know where in the world are clicks coming from .
2. Get basic analytic code implemented on the click tag " UTM" parameters, if you are using google analytic for tracking
3. Serve banners where ever possible. Use good efficient technology to serve ads directly into any ad network. It might "add" a few RUPEEEESSS to your budget but trust me it will all be worth it in the end . Technologies like "ZEDO" can come handy, if you don't want to invest in double-click and also get Indian support 24x7 , there are a few more... let me know if you need any help here.
4. Get your ad serving partner to implement click fraud detection to insure best buys and no fraud happening on the campaign.
5. Get your tech partner to do the correct geo targeting and not get clicks from unwanted territories. 
6. Also if you are also using some attribution technology pls drop cookie to bucket users on to the site, enabling you better tracking over a period of time and also measure the quality of the traffic. 

After you have taken corrective step while buying, keep a strict monitoring on the campaign when it is live to ensure that all that was planned is being delivered on the dot. 


Please keep in mind that a few things will go wrong, specially in India on CPC inventories.

1. Amount of clicks bought will not reflect in similar numbers on the analytics. there are a few reasons for this some true some myths... a separate post for that for sure.
2. Geo targeting will be off the mark by 10-30%. i.e. 10-30% of the geo targeted area will not be able to see your ads so less clicks and 10-30% of people out side of your targeted area will see your ads, so wastage.
3. Not All CPC networks / publishers will let you run ad-tags. So buy from the people you trust and not some fly-by-night site operator etc. 

Also use google analytic as one source of information and not the only truth. Use a parallel tech, or simply use server log reports to compare google analytic for a better insight, or use a "paid tool".

Also to note that buying CPC on networks or mainstream publishers is not like buying on google content network. In google, they have a lot of tech going into targeting, fraud detection, measure-ability, real-time bidding etc.

PS. New Kid on the BLOCK : COST PER VISITOR.Who says "Don't buy clicks", buy visitors. (Pls do not confuse this with something called as FPV or Full page views)  more performance to the advertiser... Interesting.. right.. 

Next post : Cost per "ACTION"... that's where all the action is... will be posting an undate on CPM efficiencies also , do read. 

Buying Efficiencies In Digital Marketing

First things first.

The Indian digital landscape is so used to buying advertising inventories in the following currencies CPM (cost per thousand impressions), CPC (Cost per click), CPL (Cost per lead) that it does not want to try and use the full potential of the term digital (track-able) aspect of media buying.

I am sure that all digital media planner have to answer the following questions while doing reports to advertisers for digital campaigns being done by them or their agencies.

Q1. If I bought clicks then how come the number people visiting my site are 30% lower than the clicks being reported

Q2. The leads that I have got are junk, my call center tells me that out of all the leads that were generated 50% of them were not contactable.

Q3. Impression being served by "x" publishers are being served at places that the user will not see them.

Q4. Email ID registrations received from the media campaign have a very high bounce %.

On the performance side all the above questions are the ones we face every day. Here is my take on a few of them.

For the past so many years I have seen that all publishers feel very happy selling CPM inventories. The only reasons for doing that in India is because the "freeuser" mentality is very high here and I am sure it is world wide as well.

So it becomes very easy for publishers to sell these free user page views to advertisers at fantastic rates and be over with it. They don't want to bothered by the fact that the advertiser using this digital medium over the years have become intelligent and want that extra mile(s) for the buck they are spending.

Just to give you an example. INR 20 CPM inventory become a INR 20 CPC if the CTR is 0.1%. ie. 1 Click for every thousand impression. And typically an INR 20 buy on any good portal would mean that the advertisers banners are running at the bottom of the page or in some obscure location on the website, resulting in adding no value to the campaign. on the other side a CPM 200 purchase @ 0.4%(an acceptable normal response rate) CTR is actually INR 50 per Click. !!

The only thing this kind of purchase will look good in, will be the reports that the agency would be giving to the advertiser at the end of campaign and claiming that they were able to give a very high "Share of Voice" or reach to the advertiser. !!

But what the advertiser needs to understand is that this kind of share of voice is not relevant as a typical webpage will have 4-5 ad units and if at all they want to look at the share of voice then they should divide the impressions by a figure of four or five. which will make it base less to even talk about.

Coming back to the topic. Buying efficiencies is not some thing that is taught in any institute or part of any communication coursebook. The only thing mentioned in the best of marketing books is the fact that you can negotiate the best rates with publishers if you sit across the table with a lot of monies committed on top of it. I say committed because an advertiser might not spend the same but it a good figure to negotiate rates with. I am over here talking only digital inventory purchases. This statement might not hold true in-case of offline i.e. print/ tv / radio etc.

Efficiencies can be defined in a lot of ways. Cost efficiencies( most common but not the most logical), value add's ( one term used and abused by a lot of publishers), quality of traffic, inventory positions (first scroll vs mast heads) etc .

But what most digital planners forget to look out for are the following efficiencies .

1. Are the click being bought converting to real traffic on the advertiser site.
2. What is the user doing after coming to the advertiser's site
3. Is the data being collected on registration of this user any good, can he be reached out later.
   

A lot of advertisers have started asking these questions back to the planners and I am sure a lot of them are also working towards providing answers or at least a plausible  solution to the advertiser. 

In the next post(s) I will try and answer one by one a solution to these above questions as each one of them would require me to dig into aspects of technology, ad serving, tracking etc. and would be too long to add to just one post. keep reading...