Affiliate Payload

August 18th, 2008

Affiliate Payload by Alex Goad, examines a facet of online marketing that has remained virtually unchanged since the dawn of the Internet Marketing era of the early 1990’s.

While things have clearly evolved and come a long way since then, the concept of what we are going to look at in this post has been around in the printing and publishing industry well before the 1900’s even came around.

It is a form of advertising called CPM, or “cost per thousand” ad impressions. It is an industry standard measure for selling adspace on Web pages.

(”M” is the Roman numeral for “thousand”, and CPM is also known as Cost Per Mille).

Though cost-per-click, or CPC, advertising is far and away the more popular choice amongst marketers, Affiliate Payload demonstrates why CPM advertising is an attractive way of gaining exposure and extending your reach to potential customers on the Internet.

Whereas Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising will cost you only if someone actually clicks on your ads, the effective costs relative to Pay Per View (CPM) advertising is calculated much differently.

(We won’t get into explaining the specifics of it here, since Affiliate Payload does it in detail)

Affiliate Payload

So, your total expenditure is simply the total amount of money you are willing to spend to have 1000 visitors view your ad. This is a sum that is pre arranged, so it is a fixed amount based on the agreements made with the advertiser. If you have established to pay, say, $5 for 1000 impressions, that is all you will pay.

However, one extremely important proviso to be aware of is that this remains true, independently of whether they enter your site or not.

CPM-based advertising programmes have have numerous strengths that make them stand out above PPC, on their own merit.

While the PPC model encourages online advertisers to indiscriminately place more and more ads, CPM effectively opts for taking quite the opposite approach. Because the advertiser is paying for his ads’ every impression, he’s strongly encouraged to be far more attentive to both the content  and the places in which the ads will appear.

The added “responsability” that advertisers find themselves shouldering often results in the side effect of continuously increasing ad quality, and this is something which ultimately benefits advertisers and viewers alike.

As you would expect, this versatile system has been refined over the years, and today there exists an evolution known as “Targeted CPM”, combining the most desirable traits of both “standard” CPM, as well as PPC programmes.

Here are some of the most beneficial features of a properly designed Targeted CPM program:

Presentation - Ads are presented in an attractive and consistent format that encourage viewing. Ads are only placed on the most visible and active portion of the page, and a limited number of ads are allowed to appear on any one page.

Relevancy - Ads consist of a headline and text message, which are both matched to the content of the displayed page. Advertiser-supplied keywords are also used to influence  matching, but the relevancy of content is the primary controller of the ad’s placement.

Responsibility - Fixed CPM pricing is used, which encourages the advertiser to give more care to the content of each ad. This further improves the overall relevancy of ads in the  program, and improves viewer interest.

Accountability - Every impression and click-thru is accurately tracked, so that the advertiser  has complete feedback on each ad’s performance. And due to the fixed CPM pricing,  fraudulent clicks have no impact on the advertiser’s cost.

Ease of Use - The text-based format of the ads makes it especially easy to create and  modify the advertising message. And the fixed rate pricing and absence of keyword bidding eliminates the need for ongoing bid maintenance.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg on CPM. Again, Affiliate Payload goes into extreme detail, even pointing you in the direction of the right Networks to get into profitable partnership with.

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