The Death of CPM
I’ve always been results driven, it was actually why i didn’t do very when i was studying for my degree in affiliate marketing, too fluffy and not enough about results, so it was a very natural fit that i ended up in affiliate marketing and part of the reason, i’ve done so well. Its also the reason why I (rightly or wrongly) don’t really think much of CPM advertising or CPA advertising…there’s just too much left to assumption and fluffy theories rather than actual quantifiable results.
CPM is a traditional form of advertising that was taken from magazines and publishers pre-internet, as a means of valuing advertising space and traffic on a site.
however the big difference between the internet and the news stand is on the internet you can glean far more information and be far more selective, this is reflected by the CPA and event Rev-share advertising models that have developed as a result of the internet, just looking at google analytics an industry standard in website analysis is evidence that when it comes to online advertising, you can be as concise as your website.
CPM has its benefits. Its good for blanket advertising and getting the word out as a means of exposure, but if you’re going to peg this to a KPI, good luck, you’ll be disappointed. And the thing is in the current economic climate where every penny is going to be scrutinized for ROI and actual deliverable results, CPM doesn’t really cut the mustard. Its too fluffy.
Large CPM networks have been struggling for some time to try and gain a foothold but with consistent drops in merchants looking for just brand exposure, its days are numbered and there are already signs that CPM publishers are being pushed into a corner to think up new ways of engaging customers, resulting in such wonderfully fluffy models as CPE (cost per engagement), a model which i believe fails to acheive anything that CPC or CPA can’t achieve with better results and more value for money, and if you consider what marketing is really about, it boils down to increasing the level of incremental sales, and surely this would be the key metric you as a marketer would be most interested in, CPM and CPE are useless in the digital world unless they can catagorically prove with firm evidence that they are infact driving incremental sales, and this is where CPC and CPA campaigns prosper.
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