My everyday AdWords campaigns are divided into 2 groups according to their goals (what is important that my company doesn’t provide e-commerce sale, everything is sold in ‘normal’ offline shops):

  1. clicks optimised ads – I want to redirect to my webpage the maximum volume of traffic as possible. Of course I have to pay attention to traffic quality, goals realization etc but in that case the most important indicator is CPC so I choose cost-per-click bidding strategy. Usually I use that strategy for “no food” products when I want my users to take a look at my whole offer (“why don’t you come to our website and choose something more or just check different colours of that t-shirt?”)
  2. impressions optimised ads – in that case I want to create branding effect, I want to show my ads as many times as possible so I do care about impressions – I simply want everybody to see my message. I use that strategy for “food” products – everything is shown on banner: product, price, offer beginning and end date. So probably the best idea is to optimise my campaign based on low CPM (for the record: in 2015 Google decided to transition CPM in viewable vCPM).
cpc or cpm?
cpc or cpm?

As I mentioned, in CPM optimised model I want my ads to be wide visible so this time “size does matter” – mile of 750×300 banners probably achieves better effect than mile of small ad. Why? The answer is simple – there will be more pixels shown.


So is CPM still the most important indicator?

What about size?

How to connect these 2 worlds?

Banner sizes
Banner sizes

Moreover there is another question: how to compare different mediums like GDN ads and big rich media formats? For sure you will have lower (v)CPM during AdWords campaign than during one day fixed price full page rich media screening. So how to compare branding effect between quite expensive big format and CPM calculated AdWord campaign?

Why don’t compare CPxM?

What CPxM stands for? This is my new idea for cost-per-Mpix-mile – cost for display mile of mega pixels (1 mln pixels) – how much do I have to pay to show million pixels thousand times.

How to calculate CPxM?

  1. divide budget by impressions
  2. multiply dimensions of your banner than divide by 1 000 000 (to have mega pixels instead pixels)
  3. divide result from point 1 by result from point 2
  4. multiply by 1 000 (to have miles)

CPxM = budget / impressions / x * Y *1000

  • CPxM – cost per Mpix mile
  • budget spent
  • impressions displayed
  • x – width of banner
  • y – height of banner

What do you think about this idea?

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