Cost per click (CPC) is a spin-off of the previous CPA model. This is when you are paid a relatively small amount of money because someone clicked on a link or advertisement on your site. The most obvious example is Google’s AdSense program (www.google.com/adsense/start/), which is covered in Chapter 13.
For a good example of CPC, imagine you have a blog about gardening. You post articles on gardening topics. Say you are registered in the Google AdSense program. You allow Google to place ads on your site (they show you how to do this easily). Google then analyzes your site and determines which ads are most appropriate given the content or location on your site.
What happens is that advertisers (merchants) pay advertising fees to Google. This side of the equation is called the Google Ads program (found at https://ads.google.com/home/). For the sake of this example, let’s say Google charges the advertiser $3.00 per click and pays you (the publisher or affiliate) $1.70 per click.If a prospect or customer is on your site, is intrigued by an ad they see there, and then clicks to go to the advertiser’s site or landing page, you earn $1.70 for that click, the advertiser paid for that single click. paid $3.00, and Google earned a gross profit of $1.30 ($3.00 – $1.70).
In this situation, the goal is simple. You keep publishing content that attracts an audience, and hopefully a good number of readers will click on the ads so you can grow. Chapter 13 lists the major firms that help you generate your share of advertising revenue with the CPC model.
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