Commission Junction Open Marketplace to publish earnings per click
Performance marketing network Commission Junction has launched what it calls the web’s first open marketplace for pay-for-performance advertising. It’s begun publishing commission, payment and conversion statistics on all advertisers, publishers and ads in its network. By making this information transparent, cost per action rates will be based on actual performance rather than negotiating skills, says Commission Junction co-founder and CEO Lex Sisney.
"One of the barriers to pay-for-performance advertising now is that the only thing an advertiser controls is how much commission they offer to the publishers (affiliates). There’s no way to efficiently determine how many results you’ll get from that publisher,” says Sisney. “Then the publishers are wondering which merchants they should be working with. Trying to make those decisions has been highly inefficient, like guesswork.”
Commission Junction publishes the data primarily as EPCs, or earnings per one hundred clicks. The EPC figures show an advertiser’s ability to convert visitors to revenue and a site operator`s potential ability to generate commissions. Additionally, a Network Earnings ranking to be published by Commission Junction will show where an advertiser or publisher ranks relative to others in the network in terms of commissions paid and earned. The earnings per click rates published won’t show information proprietary to advertisers or publishers, such as sales volume, notes Sisney; earnings per click will simply tell publishers, for example, how much commission will be paid for every 100 people they sent to a retailer.
“Advertisers and publishers have been fumbling around in the dark, unsure about fair pricing and measurable results. We have essentially turned on the lights for the online advertising industry,” says Sisney. Commission Junction, based in Santa Barbara, CA, operates a pay-for-performance advertising network consisting of 1,500 merchants and more than 500,000 publishing sites, serving up more than 6 billion impressions every month.
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