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Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Google Shifting Site Targeting Program to CPC?

At least one panelist (David Szetela) on the Ad Program Strategies: Compare and Contrast panel here at SES London, argued that while he liked the control of Google's Site Targeted flavour of content targeting, he wasn't so fussy about the CPM-based pricing model.

Coincidentally, today Google is announcing that they're beta testing a CPC-based version of Site Targeting, so advertisers who like the idea of paying by the click (that's pretty much anyone who is used to PPC as it's implemented in the rest of your account, and on YSM and MSN adCenter too) can do so.

Seems like advertisers just don't like switching to CPM-based thinking inside of a CPC-oriented platform.

Related Traffick posts:

They Listened, Again [notes our plea to drop site targeting's minimum allowable bid a second time, from $2.00 to $1.00 to $0.10... they're almost there now, at $0.25]
Was $1.00, Now Only $0.25! [reports the second drop, to $0.25]

Note, even if we go entirely over CPC's, it's always a snap to track the associated cost in CPM, if you're into apples to apples comparisons. In previous posts I had argued that even in traditional CPC-based content targeting, some of my favorite campaigns were successful precisely because of the price - which was effectively about $0.25 CPM.

Labels: content targeting, contextual ads, cpm, google adwords, paid search