When it comes to advertising online, PPC or ‘Pay Per Click’ has reigned supreme for some time. This is a form of advertising where the user only pays when someone actually clicks on their ad. This can be highly beneficial because it means that ads that aren’t seen, or that are generally ignored, will not cost them anything. But Pay Per Sale takes this even further and is the true focus you should have for your business.
Pay Per Sale essentially tells an advertiser how much they are paying for each sale. With PPC as popular as it is, it’s very easy today to focus on clicks and on terms like CTR (click through rate). However, clicks don’t tell you very much at all. In fact, a click can very often be accidental and if you use a platform like Google AdSense, then your ads will end up on sites where the webmaster is intentionally positioning your ads in places where they expect people to click on them accidentally!
Impressions don’t tell you much either: these tell you how many people are seeing your ad except this could just mean that the ad is loaded and never actually brought to a point on the page where it can be read!
So instead, you should focus on sales. This tells you what the actual ROI is for your PPC campaign because you can compare how much you’re spending with how much you’re earning.
One of the best ways to look at your pay per sale, is to set up goal tracking for Google. This means that you can create a page that places cookies on the visitor’s computer in order for you to track their behavior and their movement through your site. What you will then do, is choose the ‘thank you for your order page’ which will let you see how many of your clicks eventually go on to become paying customers. That in turn will allow you to calculate your Pay Per Sale.
There are some forms of marketing such as CPA and performance marketing where you only pay the publisher or marketer when they manage to sell your product.
