You may have heard me say this before, but I’ll say it again: when it comes to online media, always say it’s a branding campaign until the client looks at the report.
What I mean by this is, of course, it’s a branding campaign. But short of an awareness study, clients (and we agency people) are trained to judge the success of an optimization campaign by a narrow set of KPIs (define) — basically impressions, clicks, CPCs (define), actions, and CPAs (define).
While home page buyouts and premium real estate get you the high-visibility placements, they’re more often than not very expensive from a CPM (define) standpoint. As a result, they typically have very high CPC and CPA stats. When a client sees those stats on a report, the placement’s branding value often goes out the window.