What Does CPC Mean?

Transcript

What does CPC mean in terms of the reports you get from your marketing agency? That is what we’re going to talk about today as part of our What Does the Metrics Mean series? What does CPC mean?

CPC means cost per click. It is traditionally used in the language of Microsoft ads, formerly Bing ads and Google ads. It means that it’s a metric indicating how much you’re paying for someone to click on the ad to go to your website when you’re in a social platform like Facebook. CPC, there’s actually different versions of it, so you need to really know about those. There’s all CPC and unique CPC, and unique CPC is for each unique user or visitor, whereas all CPC will be all clicks regardless.

An example would be if someone is on Facebook and they click the read more, so they see your ad, but there’s more text and they click read more, Facebook will count that as a click, so it would fall under all CPC. But then if there’s a link to your website and they click to go to the website, they’ll call that a link click, and so it will fall under all clicks and link clicks. And if they click that link more than once it’ll fall under unique link clicks.

So, it’s really important when you’re looking at Facebook metrics and Facebook reports to know that you’re looking at the actual right version of links, link clicks or CPCs, because they have different versions to.. It’s for advertisers so we know are people actually just clicking around on the ad or are they actually going to the website.

But as a business owner, if you’re looking at the report, you’re not going to really understand those differences and those subtleties. So, that’s really important. On Google and Bing, I still say Bing, Bing side of things it’s pretty much just a click is a click. Now, just because they clicked doesn’t mean the page loads, so that’s something to keep in mind. You’ll get a lot of false clicks and they’ll call it as a click, but they never actually went on the page because they did it in error, especially with display on mobile phones, fat finger syndrome, and it’ll count as a click.

Now, it is believed by the more general public that when you’re using Google ads, you’re being charged per click. And yeah, that’s true. But one thing to keep in mind and something as an advertiser that I look at is CPM. That’s cost per 1000 impressions. And at the end of the day, all these platforms work on CPM and your cost per click is based on CPM, not just some arbitrary number and not just based on the competitors.

It’s a big, huge complicated calculator and process that even those of us who are in it every single day don’t know because Google doesn’t tell us. It’s proprietary. But at the end of the day, if you really want to know what you’re really paying in terms of the auction, you actually look at CPM. But most people refer to it as CPC. That’s what CPC is. It means cost per click. It does mean different things based on different platforms and know that at the end of the day, it’s actually based on impressions.

And something to know is the more hyper targeted your audience, which usually means the better the response in terms of lead generation, which is mostly what we do, the higher your CPM, but the better the quality of the lead. So, don’t get too hung up on CPC. At the end of the day, it’s return on ad spend that really matters. How much are you making or how much you’re spending, and that’s what you need to be focusing on, not so much on the other details. The other details is what your media buyer advertisers should be looking at in order to optimize your campaigns. But what you should be looking at is return on value, return on ad spend. That will be another video.