Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Adult Traffic (NSFW)

---

Do You Use CPC or CPM When Running Banner Ads? (13)

---

I tried CPC but somehow traffic usually stop flowing. Is this normal with CPC, when your CTR drops, they also send you less traffic? Is using CPM the solution to this?

---

Yes, on CPM you can often get more impressions compared to CPC.

On CPC trafficsources only make money when someone clicks your banner.

When you run CPM they make money for every impression they send to your campaign, no matter if the users click or not.

That means that traffic volume on CPC also depends on the banner CTR, higher CTR = more volume whereas the CTR doesn´t have such impact on the volume when you run CPM.

Solution is to either run CPM for more impressions with the same banner or to find banners with higher CTR to get more impressions on CPC.

For testing I would always use CPC, that way you have much more control over it.

When you don´t even know if a banner is performing good or not better play safe.

In worst example a new banner that you test could have 0% CTR.
On CPM you would still pay for the impressions, on CPC you wouldn´t pay anything because although you received impressions you didn´t get any clicks to pay for.

When the test stage is passed it depends what is better, CPC or CPM.
I personally prefer CPC over CPM in most situations because again, more control over your spend.

But when you see that a banner has a very high CTR then CPM can be better.

Here is an example:

Banner A has 0.1% CTR and you run it on $0.50 CPM.
That would mean that you get 1 click per 1k impressions so that you would pay $0.50 per click.
In that situation it probably would be better to run on CPC to pay less per click.

Now let´s say banner B has 1% CTR and you run it on $0.650 CPM.
Then you would get 10 clicks per 1k impressions and CPC goes down to $0.05.

In the end there is no universal rule what to run.
I personally prefer the safe way of running CPC and when you see that a banner has high enough CTR to get lower bids on CPM then it can be worth it.

---

CPM.

If you want to make it in any sort of display advertising you're going to need to learn how to make good banners.

Of course there are certain situations where CPC works better, but I have found those situations are fairly uncommon.

---

Sure, creating good banners and running CPM is much better when you want to run on volume.

I don't know why but I never got that comfortable with CPM.

For example when I ran a bit more adult many years ago I didn't like working with TJ because they only had CPM so I used other platforms where I could run CPC

---

My recommendation of CPM was only for adult. I can't comment on other verticals.

However from my experience all the major adult platforms (TJ, Exoclick, TrafficStars, TrafficFactory etc) push you towards CPM. If you try to run CPC on these platforms, your campaign runs for a few hours and then they stop sending you traffic.

So unless you want to run "stop and go" campaigns CPM seems to be a must for Adult.

---

I am having the same experience with Exoclick, they send you a few ten thousand impressions, and when your CTR falls to 0%, traffic stops. lol

---

I'm all for CPM too, mind you, I'm also mostly running adult traffic so that skews my opinion quite a bit... because as jabong mentioned, most adult platforms are pretty much CPM by default.

But anyways, I am one of those people who prefer CPM over CPC when talking about banner traffic. In order to compete with CPC bidding, you need high CTR creatives, which translates to misleading copy and using all the tricks that are out there, while with CPM you just bid higher and you can focus on pre-selling on the banners. This system is way more "understandable" for me

But let me repeat, this holds true with traffic types and sources where there is no in-depth optimization possible... take it to a highly advanced source like FB or google and you simply want the algo to do at least part of the work for you and find you the audience that is likely to click on your ads.

---

It seems to me that CPM is the best option for banner traffic, as you pay for impressions. but not potential actions. Also, it seems like sometimes networks can use algos to cut the amount of traffic if the CTR of your promo is low or lower than certain value.

---

Interesting topic.
I actually very much prefer CPC on adult traffic. Yes you need to find a balance between CTR/bid but once you do the banners keep running very well and most importantly you don't end up paying for millions of impressions to horny teenagers, plus you don't need to constantly refresh banner CTR stats as the traffic source algo does that work for you.

---

For me the reason to prefer CPM ove CPC is the simple fact that in order to reach higher CPC it's often needed to be misleading with the copy. Banners that converted the best for me, usually didn't have the CTR high enough to be competitve on the CPC model. So they always started to lose steam after a while and the algo wasn't giving them the impressions.

So for me personally, it's easier to adjust the bid and push the banners that I WANT and not rely on the decisions of the algo.

But of course, we all have our styles and preferences, so whatever works for you, stick to that

---

In addition to above points, I have noted that you cannot adjust rotation percentage in case of CPC on Traffic Factory. For example if I am using 3 banners, then only 1 banner gets most of the traffic and other two banners gets less traffic and you have no control on it on Traffic Factory.

---

That´s just normal.

On CPC the platform send most volume to the banner that makes them most money (highest CTR).

On CPM it doesn´t matter because you pay per impression so they can send same volume to all banners independend from the CTR.

---

very interesting

---

Home > Paid Traffic Sources > Adult Traffic (NSFW)