

Ask HN: Why would you ever choose pay per click for advertising? - the_cat_kittles

Given the difficulty of differentiating between real and bot traffic, why, as the person paying, would you choose pay per click vs pay per sale, or pay per sign up or pay per &#60;actual goal&#62;? I am not well versed in internet advertising, but from what I've recently read on here, it seems like pay-per-click is terrible.
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Ataraxy
While fraudulent traffic is a very real and annoying issue, it's largely
irrelevant when you're optimizing campaigns based on things such as ROI or
conversion rates. If the traffic source does not pan out you either attempt to
figure out why and fix it or simply move on to another.

In this sense, while you may be paying for the traffic on a click by click
basis, you're still effectively buying it based on achieving your goals.

Additionally, buying PPC traffic is far more accessible then attempting to get
things done on a pay per sign up basis.

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calbear81
Almost all advertising systems/platforms today self-optimize when you are
bidding against other advertisers vying for limited ad space. It doesn't
matter how you bid because at the end of the day there is an expected revenue
per impression (or per thousand like an RPM) that is used to determine how
much exposure you get.

For example:

CPC - You bid $1 per click to a sign up page for more information on your
product. You get a conversion rate of 10% so after spending $10, you get one
sign up and the CPA cost of that lead was $10.

CPA - You bid $5 per lead on the same system and observe the same conversion
metrics. Now assuming the clickthrough rate was the same on that ad network,
they only made $5 after the same number of impressions shown vs. the CPC
model. The effective CPC they made from sending over 10 clicks was $.50
instead of a dollar.

The ad platform will eventually optimize itself to give you a lower share of
impressions if you bid the $5 CPA because it can normalize expected
revenue/returns regardless of bidding models. This is why with a lot of CPA
deals, they require a test period to suss out the economic viability of your
bid before they will commit to delivering a large amount of impressions on a
CPA model on your behalf.

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AznHisoka
Not everyone has a product to sell. Some people are affiliates or make money
through ads.In which case, PPC is a form of arbitrage for them. Others have an
offline product, and only run ads to increase brand awareness of that product.
So pay per actions makes little sense, since they can't track them.

There are also some niches where there's more ROI in PPC.

