Image credit: Fatheed.
Your CPM rates mean virtually nothing. If you ever negotiate media buys with a website or an advertising agency, you’ll most likely get quoted in CPM rates. For example, you may have a max of $2 CPM (Cost-Per-Milli) set. That means you’ll pay $2 for every 1,000 impressions of your advertisement.
For those of you new to media buying, there are a few things you’ll want to watch out for.
- Your ad could be shown to the same person multiple times. Each time the ad is shown to the same person, it counts as an impression. You may have agreed to pay up to a $2 CPM, but you may really be paying $2 for 500 people to see your banner twice, or for a bot to see your ads 1,000 times. To avoid this, you’ll want to tell the network to show your ad to unique IPs only or limit display frequency to one impression per visitor per 24 hour period. Also known as frequency capping.
- In most cases, avoid sites that cycle advertisements. A lot of sites will show an ad for XX seconds and then display another in it’s place and constantly cycle in new ads. This way websites are able to display a lot more impressions of many advertisements and as a result earn more per user for themselves. The bad news for you is that a potential buyer could be reading your display advertisement and then a new advertisement takes its place before your potential buyer is able to click the ad. And in this case, the more competition is bad too.
These are just some of the overlooked mistakes in online CPM advertising. Also, remember to check that your ads will be in the visitors’ eye path with the proper targeting (demographics, interest-based, geographic, etc.).
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