Cost per click

Cost per click (CPC) is the amount of money an advertiser pays search engines and other Internet publishers for a single click on its advertisement that brings one visitor to its website.

Cost per action

Cost Per Action or CPA (sometimes known as Pay Per Action or PPA) is an online advertising pricing model, where the advertiser pays for each specified action (a purchase, a form submission, and so on) linked to the advertisement.

Direct response advertisers consider CPA the optimal way to buy online advertising, as an advertiser only pays for the ad when the desired action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.) Google has incorporated this model into their Google AdSense [1] offering while eBay has recently announced a similar pricing called AdContext.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

Cost per mille

Cost per mille (CPM), also called cost ‰ and cost per thousand (CPT), is a commonly used measurement in advertising. In Latin mille means thousand, therefore, CPM means cost per thousand. Radio, television, newspaper, magazine, Out-of-home advertising and online advertising can be purchased on the basis of what it costs to show the ad to one thousand viewers (CPM). It is used in marketing as a benchmark to calculate the relative cost of an advertising campaign or an ad message in a given medium. Rather than an absolute cost, CPM estimates the cost per 1000 views of the ad.

Ad serving

Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the website or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.