When running a banner/display advertising campaign there are often many options as to how the advertiser will pay the publisher or publisher network.  The general options are cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) or cost-per-action (CPA).  In the CPA pricing model the advertiser only pays the publisher if the user completes a pre-determined action.  The action will usually be the purchase of product or the submission of contact information in lead generation campaigns.  If you are running a large banner advertising campaign across two or more publisher networks that receives hundreds of thousands of impressions per day using the CPA model, it is extremely important that you use Ad serving technology.

Why you may ask… well, do you like to pay for the same thing twice?  Most often when negotiating a CPA buy with the publisher networks, they will require that they get paid on view-through conversions.  A view-through conversion occurs when an Internet user who has seen your ad, but not clicked on it, completes the predetermined action on the advertiser’s Web site.  Basically the idea is that whether the Internet user was consciously aware or only subliminally influenced by the ad they saw, it affected their behavior and it helped lead to the conversion on your Web site.  This is a logical argument and I cannot disagree that the publisher network deserves to get paid under this scenario.  Where this gets messy is when your customer has seen and been cookied for two or more ads on different publisher networks and when the customer converts ONCE, the two ad networks come knocking for payment and you have to pay TWICE for one order.

Ad serving technology such as DART for Advertisers can solve the problem of having to pay multiple times for the one conversion.  The technology enables you to attribute the conversion to only one network by telling you who last cookied the converting user.  So if your ad was seen 10 days ago on publishing network A but 2 days ago on publishing network B – only network B will get paid.  It is very important that you have the publishing networks agree to bill off of your ad serving technologies reporting.  The bigger networks only tend to trust a few brands so you’ll have to make sure you’re investing in the right tool.  Beyond being able to tell you which banner publishing network last cookied the user, some technologies will also allow you to tag all other forms of paid Internet marketing as well.  In this scenario, you’ll know whether to attribute the conversion to your email marketing campaign, paid search effort, banner advertising, or affiliate marketing campaign.

I don’t know how many advertisers out there are double and triple paying for conversions but I guarantee you it is much more than a handful.  Beware when entering into multiple CPA deals across multiple networks.  You will get excellent exposure and reach but you might also get burned.  Make sure you are protected and invest in ad serving technology.

Tags: Ad Serving Technology, Banner Advertising, DART, DART for Advertisers, DFA, Display Advertising

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Banner Advertising, Display Advertising, Rise Interactive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.