The choice between Cost per Click (CPC) or Cost per View (CPV) is completely dependent on your business goal. If your business goal demands immediate action and conversion, then you should go for the CPC model. And, if your business goal is primarily about increasing brand awareness and audience engagement, CPV is what you need.
Let’s dive in to get a better understanding of which one (CPC or CPV) suits your business:
Key features of the CPC model:
- Pay-for-Performance: This model ensures advertisers need to pay only for direct user clicks, not just for user views.
- Fixed Bid Pricing: Advertisers can fix a maximum bid limit during the CPC auction.
- Targeted Traffic: It is driven only towards conversion potential users, who are triggered by primary keywords and demographics.
- Budget Control: It restricts the traffic to target-driven users and not just for increasing views, thereby controlling the budget.
- Measurable ROI: It is easier to track ROI as each click is directly linked to website visits and conversions.
Key features of the CPV model:
- Payment Trigger: Advertisers get charged only when their ads are viewed for a minimum of 30 seconds or if the user interacts with the ad by taking any action on it.
- Focus on Engagement: This ensures advertisers are not paying for accidental clicks or counting on Skip ads, but only on real engagement.
- High Brand Impact: This mainly focusses on brand awareness that allows advertisers to tell the story in the form of a video for the users to know and understand their ad objective.
- Metric & optimization: This is calculated based on the total amount spent on the ad divided by the number of views gained. This helps the advertisers to optimize the marketing strategy as per the metric.
Difference Between CPC & CPV:
- Focus: CPC focuses on user action or clicks on the ad.
CPV focuses on the user's views on the ad.
- Goal: CPC's goal is to increase ROI by directing higher conversions.
CPV's goal is to raise brand awareness and increase engagement.
- Payment Trigger: For CPC, advertisers need to pay only when users take action.
For CPV, advertisers pay for the minimum time the video is viewed.
CPC or CPV, Which is More Expensive?
This is a debatable topic, as it depends mostly on the campaign objective, platforms, and market state. The factors that drive the costs are:
- Platforms: Costs vary significantly from one platform to another, depending on market demand as well. Some CPC is higher on Facebook and lower on YouTube, and vice versa.
- Ad Quality: Sometimes, it is the ad quality that triggers traffic instead of the CPC/CPV model driving it.
- Market Competition: The more the demand for the target audience, the higher the cost incurred by the advertisers, regardless of the CPC/CPV models opted for.
When is CPC Cheaper and Effective?
- When advertisers use high-quality scores by tightly aligning the landing page, keyword, and ad copy, the ad gets rewarded with a lower cost per click.
- Advertisers target low-competitive but effective keywords that have high chances of conversion.
- Targeting highly refined target audiences by being very specific to the brand requirement and accordingly filtering the target users.
- By using high-performing ad creatives like captivating images, videos, and compelling copywriting that trigger a signal to be listed on SEO platforms.
When is CPV Cheaper and Effective?
- Planning for optimal timing and greater audience engagement duration, focusing on a broader audience spectrum.
- Creating high-quality, engaging content that compels the target audience to stay and interact.
- Opting for skippable In-stream format ads that are highly cost-effective yet deliver to users who have the actual intent to watch the ad till the end.
- Utilising Contest and Value Bidding can maximise the audience target with comparative cost benefits.
Best Verticals for CPC (Cost Per Click)
The CPC model is highly effective for businesses that have the immediate need to bring their potential customers to their landing or purchase page.
- E-commerce Site: Perfect to drive immediate traffic to the product page to drive higher sales by targeting or retargeting potential customers.
- Mobile app installs: Drive potential traffic directly to the app store to download, install, and take actions.
- Finance/Insurance: The target audience here is mostly searched based on specific competitive keywords, which can be costly yet highly profitable.
- Lead Generation Site: Industries like education, online courses, and hospital sites that require customers to fill out forms for customer query benefit from CPC to directly target interested leads.
Best Verticals for CPV (Cost Per View)
The CPV model is highly recommended for businesses that have the need to raise brand awareness to reach out to a wide range of audiences and create their brand visibility in the market.
- Consumer goods: They use short video ads that are intriguing to capture the audience's attention.
- Travel & Tourism: This is a highly competitive market, so more than conversion, their existence needs to be driven first, which demands the CPV model.
- Entertainment: This industry is mostly driven by visibility rather than ROI, and so requires brand awareness among its audiences.
- Tech companies (Software or Service Launch) need good-quality video content streaming to make their target customer well aware of their new launch.
What does your business demand: CPC or CPV?
CPC or CPV, whichever model you choose for your business, what is important is that it should align with your business and ad goals. Different models bring in different rewards in return; you need to choose what works best for your business.
If you are still confused about which ad model will work best, connect with 3Mads. We are here to help and guide you to choose the best for your business.