When choosing a venue for advertising your website or business, there may be some confusion as to who you should use. Google and Facebook are two highly reputable and easy to use platforms in which you can custom target the individuals who will see your advertising, but the choices do not end there. You also have to determine whether you want to establish an advertising budget based on clicks or impressions. For those who are not familiar with these two different advertising methods, we will explain them – along with their advantages and disadvantages – in greater detail below.

Pay Per Click Advantages

One of the biggest advantages of utilizing pay per click (PPC) is that you are only billed for advertising shown to individuals that results in them following-through to your website. This means that you are only paying for clicks that should result in some form of interest, revenue or buzz for your business. Many reports display that pinging links via Adwords to a targeted group can be very cost-effective when using PPC advertising, but you will have to find the sweet spot in your niche to get the best results.

Pay Per Click Disadvantages

The drawbacks to pay per click advertising campaigns may make some webmasters and business owners wary of using them – depending on their budget. The cost you will pay for just one click may surpass the cost of tens of thousands of impressions in a CPM campaign. If you have your targeted demographics wrong or have malicious competitors out there who wish to drain your budget dry, then you might be in for a rude awakening. Pay per click campaigns also do not work well when targeting larger topics or a broader audience; for this, we recommend the use of PPC campaigns only when dealing with a microscopic audience.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions Advantages

The style of campaign known as CPM pertains to selecting and targeting a demographic much like in PPC campaigns, but in this instance you are billed for each impression instead of being billed only for clicks. Impression-based campaigns tend to be very cheap; in many cases, you can have your ad seen thousands of times for less than a dollar. This also means that while your ad is running, you can usually monitor the statistics such as click through rate (CTR) and make any budgetary changes as necessary – before massive amounts of money have been spent. Impression-based campaigns are therefore ideal for those on a budget.

Cost Per Thousand Impressions Disadvantages

While you will certainly be pinging links to tens of thousands of users, impression campaigns have their disadvantages as well. For starters, your ad may be shown to the same person multiple times – and you are billed for each instance it is displayed. Generally, the average person will see your ad 3-5 times in a targeted campaign over the course of a week through a platform like Facebook. You may also find out that you are being billed for mostly no result; the average CTR for a well-done advertisement will be 0.3-0.5% of total impressions made with this type of campaign.