Epic Advertising Announces New Advertising Metric: pCPM
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Epic Advertising has announced the official launch of Performance CPM (pCPM), a new metric that allows advertisers to track performance-marketing campaigns by measuring “induced visits.â€
This new approach promised to enable advertisers to determine campaign effectiveness.
pCPM is rooted in induced visits, or visits to an advertiser’s site tracked beyond direct clicks. A visit to an advertiser’s site is “induced†if it results in any way from an ad, even if there is no immediate response or direct click path from ad to site. This metric goes beyond traditional campaign measurement tactics by employing scientific techniques to discern the broadest types of cause and effect, excluding things like “accidental clicks.â€
Along with measuring induced visits, the metric encompasses elements from traditional tracking methods – CPC, CPM and CPA – as well as inherent branding impacts to offer a more holistic view of an online advertising campaign’s success. Because pCPM involves only statistics, it avoids any retention of Personally Identifiable Information (PII).
According to their announcement, Epic Advertising’s pCPM was refined internally over a 6-month period and tested in beta on a handful of selected advertising campaigns. Beta test results demonstrated induced visits accounted for a 60% increase on top of clicks.
It will be interesting to see if this patent pending metric is adopted, in some form, across other networks.
- Posted in Affiliate News
It will be surprising if they can get a patent on what most other folks call cookie stuffing, and what other advertising companies have been recently re-branding as “view through conversions”. Perhaps I'm cynical but it all just seems to be a clever way to put a premium on the millions of unsold banner inventory in webmail, games, and other worthless placements.
reply to this commentI agree this sounds like “view throughs” – tracking conversions from impressions = forced clicks.
reply to this commentThat crossed my mind when I read the announcement, but I figured I was reading too much into it.
This is something they should clarify.
reply to this commentI heard from Michael Sprouse (Chief Marketing Officer) and Bill Softky (Chief Algorithm Officer) of Epic Advertising with regards to comments about pCPM:
“Your readers raise valid questions on the surface (and they actually match a false conclusion drawn by another industry writer who failed to allow us to comment). I’d like to clarify our solution “View Throughâ€; they are all in the same ballpark, but pCPM and induced visits are on the “field levelâ€, while everything else I’ve seen is in the “upper deckâ€. Which is why we are pretty confident in our patent-pend. Everyone’s trying to quantify the same thing – which is true online advertising effectiveness and influence. The various metrics and tracking methods have the same goal. Ours is done right (we believe) and differs in execution.
To make our solution clearer, I want to point to a few pieces for reference before I get to pCPM & Induced Visits: first, http://www.doubleclick.com/insight/pdfs/dc_cont.... This white paper, meant to show via a Case Study how view-through is beneficial to an advertiser, fails in a few ways: 1) there’s no proper explanation of what the “control†was; 2) all the data is expressed in percentages so we the reader can’t be sure there’s any statistical significance; 3) without these key elements, we can’t know the exact results of the “View Through†model – its sort of a Black Box. Further, from what I’ve read (both this white paper and other literature on the topic), the biggest issue is that it is only a test of the concept, nothing at all like a packaged metric that advertisers can plug in and actually derive value from. In fact, this View Through model could never be an accurately packaged metric since it seems to require an advertiser wasting half their budget on control ads which don’t actually do anything beneficial to an advertiser. Our solution requires no A/B testing or further investment, it “plugs inâ€.
The second piece I’d like to point your attention to, which is much “meatierâ€, is: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625449. This article is very solid in that it approves the goal of statistically-measured visits (our same goal), but trashes the implementation. Two-thirds of this piece is about how “view-through†is measured, why it can overstate visits, and details a bunch of processes advertisers would have to take to actually implement it and make it work. One could conclude from this that basically “view-through†counts ALL visits following ANY ad-views, which can obviously get totally out of control when you have lots of ads being shown and lots of people likely to visit just by chance, or through accidental clicks, parallel SEO efforts, etc. As a final test, since this concept was introduced years ago, how many people do you know who use “View Throughâ€?
These are problems we feel we solve. The author above points out that “View-Through†measures all the visits after ad views. But “induced visitsâ€, what pCPM is based on, are different; the deep technical problem isn’t discovering if someone saw the ad and then visited the site; that’s easy. The problem is removing the baseline level of site-visits which would have happened anyway, from a variety of other sources and inputs, and measuring that difference in a way that is statistically soundproof. And we’ve solved it in a way so straightforward and robust that it can be automated as a metric, not just paraded out in whitepapers on special occasions, and usable by an advertiser – again, complementary (yet more comprehensively) to CPA, CPC, CPM or however an advertiser traditionally measures their campaigns, without any further spending or A/B “testingâ€.”
reply to this commentI heard from Michael Sprouse (Chief Marketing Officer) and Bill Softky (Chief Algorithm Officer) of Epic Advertising with regards to comments about pCPM:
“Your readers raise valid questions on the surface (and they actually match a false conclusion drawn by another industry writer who failed to allow us to comment). I’d like to clarify our solution “View Throughâ€; they are all in the same ballpark, but pCPM and induced visits are on the “field levelâ€, while everything else I’ve seen is in the “upper deckâ€. Which is why we are pretty confident in our patent-pend. Everyone’s trying to quantify the same thing – which is true online advertising effectiveness and influence. The various metrics and tracking methods have the same goal. Ours is done right (we believe) and differs in execution.
To make our solution clearer, I want to point to a few pieces for reference before I get to pCPM & Induced Visits: first, http://www.doubleclick.com/insight/pdfs/dc_cont.... This white paper, meant to show via a Case Study how view-through is beneficial to an advertiser, fails in a few ways: 1) there’s no proper explanation of what the “control†was; 2) all the data is expressed in percentages so we the reader can’t be sure there’s any statistical significance; 3) without these key elements, we can’t know the exact results of the “View Through†model – its sort of a Black Box. Further, from what I’ve read (both this white paper and other literature on the topic), the biggest issue is that it is only a test of the concept, nothing at all like a packaged metric that advertisers can plug in and actually derive value from. In fact, this View Through model could never be an accurately packaged metric since it seems to require an advertiser wasting half their budget on control ads which don’t actually do anything beneficial to an advertiser. Our solution requires no A/B testing or further investment, it “plugs inâ€.
The second piece I’d like to point your attention to, which is much “meatierâ€, is: http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3625449. This article is very solid in that it approves the goal of statistically-measured visits (our same goal), but trashes the implementation. Two-thirds of this piece is about how “view-through†is measured, why it can overstate visits, and details a bunch of processes advertisers would have to take to actually implement it and make it work. One could conclude from this that basically “view-through†counts ALL visits following ANY ad-views, which can obviously get totally out of control when you have lots of ads being shown and lots of people likely to visit just by chance, or through accidental clicks, parallel SEO efforts, etc. As a final test, since this concept was introduced years ago, how many people do you know who use “View Throughâ€?
These are problems we feel we solve. The author above points out that “View-Through†measures all the visits after ad views. But “induced visitsâ€, what pCPM is based on, are different; the deep technical problem isn’t discovering if someone saw the ad and then visited the site; that’s easy. The problem is removing the baseline level of site-visits which would have happened anyway, from a variety of other sources and inputs, and measuring that difference in a way that is statistically soundproof. And we’ve solved it in a way so straightforward and robust that it can be automated as a metric, not just paraded out in whitepapers on special occasions, and usable by an advertiser – again, complementary (yet more comprehensively) to CPA, CPC, CPM or however an advertiser traditionally measures their campaigns, without any further spending or A/B “testingâ€.”
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