What is the Difference between CPC, CPM and EPC?
27. Apr, 2011 
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Anyone with more than a passing interest in Internet marketing quickly becomes familiar with the acronym, CPC, which means cost per click. CPC and CPM are the prevalent revenue models for media buying online, and EPC is related to the realm of affiliate marketing. For those who are new to these revenue models, we’ll take a basic look at each one describing What they mean and what the differences are between them within the online marketing space.
What is CPC?
CPC means cost per click, and this revenue model is used to price many of the PPC or pay per click advertising models such as Google’s AdWords or Bing and Yahoo!’s Microsoft Ad Network. As the name implies, advertisers place ads in search engine results pages, or within a content network, but they only pay when a visitor actually clicks on the ad.
When tracking and testing mechanisms are put into place, CPC marketing can yield lots of data that can help marketers choose the most effective keywords, and landing pages.
What is CPM?
CPM means cost per thousand (mille) impressions, which are page loads of an online advertisement. The CPM model is more advantageous when you are dealing with high traffic sites because you are banking on the fact that a certain number of people per thousand will click on your ad. On the right website with a steady flow of targeted traffic the CPM model can be quite effective.
What is EPC?
EPC which is short for average Earnings per 100 clicks, is a term used within the realm of affiliate marketing. It is used to measure the average earnings within a 7 day period that an affiliate can expect to earn for every 100 clicks that they are able to generate. This calculation can be helpful to affiliates when they are seeking out new products to promote.
Commission Junction, which is a popular affiliate network says the following about EPC: “EPC is an exclusive metric of the CJ Marketplace given for publishers, advertisers, and individual ads, and is a relative rating that illustrates the ability to convert clicks into commissions.”
CPC is the most effective pricing model for smaller advertisers looking to buy guaranteed traffic for their websites. EPC is a different kind of metric, that is actually limited to the world of online affiliate marketing .
At the end of the day, the most important metric in all of this is your website’s conversion rate, which can be expressed as its ability to convert visitors into customers, or getting visitors who land on your site to take a desired action such as subscribe to your email list or RSS feed. So the conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who take the action that you want them to take on your website.
When you are first starting out it is important to arm yourself with enough knowledge to get started taking forward action. Don’t wait until you feel like you know enough because that day will most likely never come due to the constantly changing nature of online marketing.
When you are ready to learn more about CPC, CPM, EPC and those other confusing acronyms related to Internet marketing, you should visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog, and subscribe to our RSS feed. You’ll get a ton of information that you can use to make more money in less time and maybe even have some fun doing it.
