PPC Has Always Been the Wrong Term
It may seem like a small point, but “pay-per-click” was the nickname given to paid search advertising back when it started out, but it only describes a pricing method, not the nature of the media or what we seek from it. (In the proto-days of that same technology, “paid keywords” or “buying keywords” was another way of describing it.) I was reminded of this whole mental muddle today reading the headline from an email solicitation, something about “getting more PPC without using Google”. But that whole line is kind of old hat. It’s the come-on that opportunistic, non-search-based ad platform companies used to sell their crummy, remnant, and sometimes fraudulent contextual text ad inventory. Sometimes it couldn’t have even been described that neatly. It was traffic, and you paid for the clicks, and potentially you used keywords to guide the system towards certain publishers, but that was about it. You might as well have paid the effective CPM rate, as bid on clicks. Didn’t matter. That’s why I always advocated paid search as the term of choice for people who really wanted to go after clicks from ordered results placed near search engine results, but it scarcely matters what I advocate! — people will use all kinds of terms. SEM is another term that arose. Agenda-setters in the business tried to remind everyone that paid search (or “PPC”) is one sub-type of SEM (search engine marketing), and SEO (on the “organic side”) is another sub-type. But the fight to make SEM exclusively the global term, and not to be used as synonymous with PPC or paid search, was lost. SEM is often used interchangeably with PPC or paid search. No matter. With all of these nomenclature battles being unwinnable, we should turn our attention to the whole reason “PPC” was so attractive as a pricing mechanism. It’s because it represented a happy medium between CPM (paying only for impressions — “cost per thousand impressions”) and CPA (”cost per acquisition” — paying for lead conversions or even revenue-generating sales conversions). You can draw up equivalents across these mechanisms, and measure or express them all for your keyword (paid search) campaigns. So the click isn’t anything special. It can be expressed in its CPM equivalent and you can and should also be measuring ROI, ROAS, or CPA. Indeed, according to some scholars [see " Greedy Bidding Strategies for Keyword Auctions "], the most rational strategy for bidding in a digital media auction would take you straight to CPA or revenue if that was possible. If you could bid directly on the customer acquisition or revenue, you would. (And in fact, that’s what some forms of bid management automation attempt to do, at one or two removes. And it’s what manual campaign management also attempts to do, painstakingly.) But step back further. Are search, keywords, or clicks inherently special? Why the drive to distinguish them from other forms of media? Is it for what they are, or what they represent? It has to be the latter. They represent potentially the most extreme (and measurable) form of granular targeting and flexible bidding, of a certain type. This is reflected in the sky-high effective CPM rates for some keywords. But that means that all of this distinguishing one type or another is done mostly for economic or practical reasons. Search and keywords (and clicks) fall into the general category of auction-based digital media . Whether we’re bidding on clicks, acquisitions, impressions, or other, the universe of digital media is amenable to similar tests. From a rational bidder’s standpoint, there should be no inherently good or bad media, nothing inherently “creepy” or “wrong,” nothing inherently above reproach either. That’s mostly true. It’s not entirely true. (Dropping ad-laden anvils on prospects’ vehicles is interruption media, and some companies would pay for it, but it’s stupid and illegal.) But isn’t it a good starting point for analysis? “PPC” doesn’t matter per se . So pitches like “now you can get ‘PPC’ from other channels than Google” shouldn’t have any special weight. You shouldn’t be looking too hard for that inventory if your economic criteria show it’s not going to pay off for you. Nor should you have been ignoring it all along just because you thought that “PPC” or “Google” were special for some inherent reason. —– Download a FREE E-Book by Andrew Goodman: Google AdWords: A Brave New World Are you new to search marketing and looking to come up to speed quickly to Google AdWords? Or maybe you’ve just fallen a tiny bit behind, and you’re looking to re-engage with the latest thinking. If so, Andrew’s free e-book is for you.
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11-07-2009, 07:06 AM
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