As with most rules of the internet, online advertising rules are also framed and set by Google because of the way it approaches the matters related to the internet and its uses. Therefore, after Google introduced CPV advertising, it is gradually becoming law as all the other big players also begin adopting it.
This isn’t easy for an organization that dominates the business overwhelmingly, but to their credit, Google has been able to uphold the interests of the common user with its periodic updates. This has not just won it the respect and trust of users all over the world but has also consolidated its foundations and made it the gentle giant it is today. True, at the end of it all, Google has to consider the business end of things and this balanced approach has only made its business stronger than ever before.
CPV advertising is a milestone
As an advertiser, if you get charged for every click on your ads across domains, irrespective of whether those clicks were intended or not, you feel there’s some kind of unfairness in the system. As a user, if you end up spending 30-40% of your browsing time waiting for ads that you clicked unintentionally after they popped up on you, rather annoyingly, you’re likely to feel cheated. And then the first thing that crosses your mind is – ‘this is madness…isn’t there a method to it?’ Rest assured, there is, and none other than your friendly neighborhood Google and now, Facebook says so.
Enter CPV advertising. So, what exactly is it and why is it special? Let’s understand it from the advertiser’s point of view first. Under CPV advertising, or more precisely, under what Google designed, TrueView, you pay for views or clicks only when your ad has been viewed for at least 30 seconds or clicked and then viewed for at least 30 seconds. Apparently, this format includes both the CPM and CPC methods but the overriding principle is that in either case, the ad would have to be viewed for at least 30 seconds. As an advertiser who has been paying for every click, intended or unintended, this is great.
Now, how will CPV benefit the common user, or, as an online business may say, the customer? As customers many of us know that marketers call us the “King.” But in reality, do they treat us like kings? If you look at the way they ‘ambush’ us at every turn with pop ads that take their time to load when clicked, intentionally or unintentionally, it would not appear that they care about the king. When you end up spending half your browsing time negotiating these pop ads that fall on you like rain, you’re reminded of the old joke – “Long Live the King. The King is Dead!”
Who’s responsible for this madness?
As a common user, your first reaction to this pop ads madness is to be angry at the advertiser. Well, you have reason to be angry but you’re mistaken if you think it’s the advertiser who’s responsible for this madness. Let’s first understand how it works – the ads could belong to any advertiser e.g. Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks, etc. but it’s the website you’re on, where all this madness takes place. If you notice carefully, the intensity of ads popping up every now and then is not the same on every website that you visit. So, it is the website owner or publisher who is running this riot. And CPV advertising is designed to pull these rioters up and get them follow the rules set by the big boys like Google and Facebook.
Now let’s look at another interesting side of this madness where the advertiser whom we decided to cover thinking they’re not to blame for bombarding users with pop ads. The objective of an ad is to get the customer to a seller’s website because it is a seller who advertises, generally. Now when you land up on the seller’s website there is every chance that you would again come up against the barrage of pop ads that the seller would use to upsell other items that you hadn’t planned to buy. Alternately, since the seller is now the website owner, he would have other businesses advertising on his site. And that again brings us back to square one which is what we called ‘madness.’
CPV advertising is designed to deal with this madness and make it difficult for marketers to run riot on the internet. With the bulk of the traffic originating from mobile devises that work on touch-screen method, we just can’t afford to have the kind of wastage of time and money that unintentional clicks on pop ads cause. After all, it is today’s advanced marketing automation tools that make such advertising happen and it is taken advantage of by the website owner or publisher who sells advertising space on his domain. It is the publisher who uses advanced marketing automation ads to bombard visitors to his site with pop ads. Till now it was earning him revenues from unintentional clicks. Not any more…thanks to CPV advertising.