What Is CPC Ads And Placement Targeting Which Google Is Boasting About?

Nov 13, 2007

What Is CPC Ads And Placement Targeting Which Google Is Boasting About?

Google AdSense announced two new changes to there AdSense system and as expected they end up stating that the changes will be helpful for the publisher as well as for the advertiser. I read through there complete public announcement and after some long thought processing here is what I think how there changes might be (OR might not be) helpful for the publishers as well as the advertisers. I got this news via Darren’s blog and expected him to give his insight as to how he thinks the changes will affect the users of AdSense but unfortunately he didn’t. So here goes my insight!

Change One

The first change is that we’ve renamed ’site targeting’ to ‘placement targeting’ to better reflect the variety of targeting options we offer. Advertisers can still target their ads to an entire site, but they can now also target your individual ad units or groups of pages based on how you’ve set up ad placements using custom channels

Advertisers will now be able to target individual channels which the publishers use to track the earnings from different ad spots. But remember that it is always the high traffic sites which the advertisers like to target for there ads. (Even though targeting is more costly, it pays of more with better ad clicks.)

So the new system (change one) will be beneficial for Google Whores (those adsense publishers who earn huge amounts from adsense) and the normal publishers should not feel any differences because of this change. Why? As I said earlier a advertiser will have to pay more if he targets some specific website. So the general belief is that the advertiser will like to pay a little more and go for websites which drive heavy traffic. For sites with low traffic (and in turn less clicks) advertisers usually do not target ads. In this case it is the other general ads which are not targeted for specific sites that are shown on the specific ad spots in those low traffic sites.

Change Two

The second change is that advertisers can bid on placement-targeted ads (formerly known as site-targeted ads) on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis. Previously, advertisers could only bid on these targeted ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Just as with contextually targeted CPC ads, you’ll generate earnings for valid clicks on placement-targeted CPC ads.

With CPC ad paying system the publisher will be paid for every click which he generates from his blog. Until now the CPM ad system used to pay money as cost-per-thousand impressions. The catch here is that the advertiser will now have more fine details as per which section of which blog is generating what kind of clicks. So they will be able to target the most heavily paying spots. But once again to target these they will have to spend more money. (Targeting requires extra money in AdSense)

In short again the sites with heavy traffic might see a jump in there revenue with CPC in place whereas the low traffic sites might not see any huge changes in there AdSense earnings.

You need to work on your site, get some traffic and than think of being the part of Google Whores list!

Until then I would love to know your views. Was my analysis correct about the two new changes introduced by Google?

[image via FemaCamper]

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