Just yesterday I was asked by MediaPost about my thoughts on Google’s “new” Placement Targeting for a upcoming article they were working on. I was quoted in the article as saying the CPM is “so old school”, so I wanted to take a moment to elaborate on that concept a bit more.

For readers unfamiliar with CPM I’ll just point you to Wikipedia. Previously, Google offered Site Targeting, a method for listing your Google Ads on a wide variety of non-Google sites. The principle bidding method for Site Targeting was CPM. Often advertisers didn’t know what price to start their bidding at and most of the time the bids were too low. With Placement Targeting Google has revamped Site Targeting and is now asking the advertiser to bid on ads using the familiar Google CPC (cost-per-click) method. This change by Google makes bidding on non-Google ads a more understandable process for the new advertiser.

CPM still has it’s place for branding; however it is my stance that CPM is quickly going the way of the dodo bird. Our clients aren’t likely to quantify branding via CPM, yet CPC is very quantifiable. CPC measures action, CPM hopes for increased awareness. One method gives me a shotgun to hit my target from 50 yards, while the other gives me a sniper rifle to hit my target from 300 yards. I’ll take the sniper rifle please.