Cost Per Click or CPC (as it is often initialized to) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles.

With many advertising networks and websites, the advertiser is charged for advertising their ad (on the advertising network or website) only when a user clicks on their ad. How much they pay (for that click) is called their Cost Per Click or CPC.

The CPC can be determined by different factors, depending on which advertising network or website the advertiser is advertising on.

Other common forms, of charging for advertising, include:

• CPM
• CPA
• CPT

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Effective Cost Per Action (often abbreviated to eCPA) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles.

CPA is considered the optimal form of buying online advertising from the advertiser’s point of view, as they only pay for an advert when an 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.)

eCPA is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis. In other words, the eCPA tells the advertiser what they would have paid if they purchased the advertising inventory on a CPA basis (instead of a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis).

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Messaging spam, sometimes termed spim (a portmanteau of spam and IM, short for instant messenger), makes use of instant messaging systems, such as AOL Instant Messenger or ICQ. Many IM systems offer a directory of users, including demographic information such as age and sex. Advertisers can gather this information, sign on to the system, and send unsolicited messages. To send instant messages to millions of users on most IM services merely requires scriptable software and the recipients’ IM usernames. Spammers have similarly targeted Internet Relay Chat channels, using IRC bots that join channels and bombard them with advertising messages. Because most IM protocols are proprietary, it is easier to enact unilateral changes to make spamming more difficult.

A similar sort of spam can be sent with the Messenger Service in Microsoft Windows. The Messenger Service is an SMB facility intended to allow servers to send pop-up alerts to a Windows workstation. When Windows systems are connected to the Internet with this service running and without an adequate firewall, it can be used to send spam. The Messenger Service can, however, be easily disabled. [1]

Messenger service spam, in particular, has lent itself to spammer use in a particularly circular scheme. In many cases, messenger spammers send messages to vulnerable Windows machines consisting of text like “Annoyed by these messages? Visit this site.” The link leads to a Web site where, for a fee, users are told how to disable the Windows messenger service. Though the messenger service is easily disabled for free by the user, this scam works because it creates a perceived need and then offers an immediate solution. Oftentimes, the only “annoying messages” the user is receiving through Messenger are advertisements to disable Messenger itself.

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E-mail marketing is popular with companies because:

• It is extremely cheap. Compared to direct mailing or printed newsletters the costs are negligible. The advertiser does not need to pay for production, paper, printing or postage.
• It is instant, as opposed to a mailed advertisement, an e-mail arrives in a few seconds or minutes.
• It lets the advertiser “push” the message to its audience, as opposed to a website that waits for customers to come in.
• It is easy to track. An advertiser can track bounce-backs, positive or negative responses, click-throughs, rise in sales.
• Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them
• It has been proven successful when well done.
• When most people switch on their computer the first thing they do is check their e-mail.
• Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger other messages to be automatically delivered.

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Affiliate Marketing is a popular method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber and/or customer provided through his efforts. It is a modern variation of the practice of paying finder’s-fees for the introduction of new clients to a business. Compensation may be made based on a certain value for each visit (Pay per click), registrant (Pay per lead), or a commission for each customer or sale (Pay per Sale), or any combination.

The most attractive aspect of affiliate marketing, from the merchant’s viewpoint, is that with this pay for performance model, no payment is due to an affiliate until results are realized.

Some e-commerce sites run their own affiliate programs while other e-commerce vendors use third party services provided by intermediaries to track traffic or sales that are referred from affiliates. Some businesses owe much of their growth and success to this marketing technique, although research has shown in general the increase to be approximately 15-20% of online revenue.

Some advertisers offer multi-tier affiliate programs that distribute commission into a hierarchical referral network of sign-ups and sub-affiliates. In practical terms: publisher “A” signs up the affiliate program with an advertiser and gets rewarded for the agreed activity conducted by a referred visitor. If publisher “A” attracts other publishers (”B”, “C”, etc.) to sign up for the same affiliate program using her sign-up code all future activities by the joining publishers “B” and “C” will result in additional, lower commission for publisher “A”.

Snowballing, this system rewards a chain of hierarchical publishers who may or may not know of each others’ existence, yet generate income for the higher level signup. Most affiliate programs are simply one-tier.

Merchants who are considering adding an affiliate strategy to their online sales channel should research the different technological solutions available to them. Some types of affiliate management solutions include: standalone software, hosted services, shopping carts with affiliate features, and third party affiliate networks.

In its early days many internet users held negative opinions of affiliate marketing due to the tendency of affiliates to use spam to promote the programs in which they were enrolled. As affiliate marketing has matured many affiliate merchants have refined their terms and conditions to prohibit affiliates from spamming.

Currently there is much debate around the affiliate practice of Spamdexing and many affiliates have converted from sending email spam to creating large volumes of autogenerated webpages each devoted to different niche keywords as a way of SEOing their sites with the search engines. This is sometimes referred to as spamming the search engine results. Spam is the biggest threat to organic Search Engines whose goal is to provide quality search results for keywords or phrases entered by their users. Google’s algorithm update dubbed “Big Daddy” in February 2006 which was the final stage of Google’s major update dubbed “Jagger” which started mid-summer 2005 specifically targeted this kind of spam with great success and enabled Google to remove a large amount of mostly computer generated duplicate content from its index.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.