Moving to cost per action advertising

In the first article in this series, I discussed switching from CPM to CPC campaigns (see that article for an explanation of these terms). In this second article, I’ll go one step further than just getting paid for clicks, by introducing conversion tracking.

Advertisers don’t buy a campaign because they like the site’s publisher. Their business goal is to increase sales. While there is a place for just raising brand awareness, ultimately it’s all about bringing in potential buyers, presenting them an attractive offer for a product or service, and completing the transaction.

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Switching from pay per view to pay per click

In the past few weeks, I’ve talked to a number of publishers who had a remarkably similar story: advertisers are starting to cut their ad budgets, and as a result site owners see their ad revenue decline. Whether or not it is a good idea to reduce advertising budgets is not my call, only time will tell. But for site publishers, it’s a real problem.

In a series of articles, I’ll present steps publishers can take to act on this trend. You’ll see that the overall strategy is to reduce the risk for advertisers and to find ways of adding more value than just offering display advertising. In this first part, I will discuss switching from CPM to CPC campaigns (I’ll explain these terms below).

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The Oranjerie building at the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam

On Thursday November 13, 2008, a group of OpenX publishers gathered in the beautiful Laranjezaal at the Hortus Botanicus in Amsterdam for the first ever OpenX community event in The Netherlands. In addition to Dutch users, there were also delegates from France, Austria and Monaco. I had the privilege of hosting the event, organized in close cooperation with OpenX.org London.

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Together with OpenX, I’m hosting the first OpenX community-led event on Thursday, 13th November in Amsterdam. It’s a free event and everyone is invited.

Judging by the registrations so far, on the day you will meet a really interesting mix of new and experienced OpenX users, along with people evaluating the software.

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Today marks a special day for OpenX, because of the launch of two new offerings: OpenX Hosted and OpenX Market.

OpenX Hosted is a mostly free, hosted version of the well known ad server, available over the web, saving publishers from installing, configuring, maintaining, upgrading and worrying. OpenX Market is a new way for publishers to monetize their web site through an open market place of advertisers and publishers.

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