Recently, Facebook announced that it won’t charge advertisers for unintentional clicks on their advertisements by users. This is a very important development for CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising because it further improves the filter that determines the advertisers ROI. Google, the other internet major that sets trends in online media, has already been using this filtration process for the benefit of their advertisers.
It goes to show how important the advertisers are for the internet platforms and it also shows that the customer is truly cared for. After all, in the B2B context, the advertisers are the customers of platforms like Google and Facebook among others. However, not everyone is happy about this development, especially the publishers whose websites and portals are the direct beneficiaries of advertising revenue.
Why this development will strengthen CPC
This has been a major issue of grievance for advertisers because of the nature of online advertising today. The bulk of the advertising comprises pop up ads that is not always used rationally by the publishing websites. There are websites with quite heavy traffic that charge exorbitant rates for advertising on their platforms but do little to streamline the process to improve user experience on their sites. The lure of more and more advertising revenues have led them to allow more advertisements to be displayed on their websites than possible.
As a result, there is overcrowding of advertisements on their websites which lead to the increasing incidence of pop up ads almost all over their webpages. This makes of poor user experience because it becomes very difficult for the users to navigate through all these ads popping up every now and then. On certain sites, it’s literally difficult to read an article or a blog because there are hyperlinks all over the content. The moment the cursor touches the link an ad would pop up and then the usual annoying wait would follow till the ad gets loaded.
For the publishing website this kind of accidental clicks means money and more money. Who cares if the clicks were intentional or not? As long as there are ads there will be clicks and that’s all that matters. Not anymore, says the big boys of the internet, Google and Facebook. CPC is a critical part of online advertising and it needs to be handled with a lot more care than was being done so far. Going by the thumb rule, it is the user who needs to be treated with a lot more sensibility and respect than many of the publishing websites care to do. It’s the user traffic that makes or breaks a website and nobody understands it better than the giants like Google and Facebook.
CPC advertising ensures optimum ROI
There is nothing better than to know how many times your ad has been clicked because it gives you an idea of the kind of response your ad is generating. However, if the bulk of the clicks don’t result in traffic that bounces out of your webpage no sooner than they land on it, there is something wrong, and it need not necessarily be your ad design. As it turns out now, it is because your ad has been unintentionally clicked by a user who is not interested in what you’re offering. As an advertiser, you don’t want that to happen because every click on your ad costs you money.
This is where publisher discretion gains importance. Publishers should allow only that much CPC advertisements on their websites as can be possible. And how are they to do it? Not very difficult – they need to automate their pages in a way wherein user experience is not affected by out of turn pop up ads. Right now, with marketing automation having a free run of web pages, it has become difficult for publishers to really take user experience more seriously. They think the user has no choice but that can be a big mistake. The user should not be taken for granted.
When CPC advertising follows certain rules, especially those that have a direct relationship to the very essence of the internet, which is to ensure optimum user experience, everyone in the chain stands to win. If publishers want to corner all the benefits and marketing automation suppliers think they can go on handing newer variants of their tools to the publishers to make life difficult for the users, they’re now up for a little surprise. Rules are now being rewritten by the market leaders and the rest would do well to follow these rules. Eventually, it is not just the end user who wins but also the seller who has nothing between him and his customer but his ad. If that medium works as well as it is known to work, everybody, in the chain will be happy.