CPC FAQs: What to Know & Best Practices
What’s the value of turning on CPC demand?
CPC networks access premium cost-per-click rates across an extensive merchant network and product catalog. These budgets are frequently higher paying than comparable CPA programs and can sometimes provide coverage where traditional affiliate budgets can’t.
What’s the value of enabling Yield Optimization?
While affiliate marketing is a simple way to monetize your content, maximizing the value of every click presents a huge challenge. The fact is, there’s an incredible amount of overlap in the affiliate industry. A publisher looking to monetize traffic to a particular merchant might have 10 or more networks to choose from, each with different rates and budgets that may change at any time. Yield Optimization manages this process for you, ensuring you maximize the value of each and every click.
Online gifting service Elfster experienced the power of Sovrn’s Yield Optimization tool first-hand during the busy holiday season. Simply by leveraging Sovrn Commerce — with Yield Optimization running in the background — the Elfster team saw higher bids for affiliate traffic resulting in a 21% increase in EPCs.
See more: https://www.sovrn.com/blog/yield-optimization/
Why didn’t I earn on all of my clicks?
While CPC often provides a more lucrative opportunity, it does not come with any guarantees. The decision of a CPC buyer to purchase a click depends on various factors, including their budget, the user that is interacting with the link, and the type of publisher the buyer is choosing to prioritize at that moment. Utilizing Yield Optimization ensures we find the best available rate for you, but there may be instances where no rate is available. In such cases, our dedicated demand team is ready to assist you with any coverage issues you experience for a particular merchant.
A portion of my clicks appear to have been affiliated by a CPC network but do not have any revenue included, what’s going on here?
In 2023, nearly half of all internet traffic was generated by bots. To tackle this, Sovrn has implemented rigorous traffic filtering to minimize non-human traffic in our auctions. However, some clicks may only be identified as bot traffic after they occur. This results in around 5-10% of a publisher's CPC traffic being invalidated post-click. Our dedicated demand team closely monitors these instances and proactively investigates any unusual spikes in click invalidations. If you're interested, we can provide automated reports detailing your validation rates. You can also view your validation rate in the dashboard by filtering for CPC and checking the "conversion rate." This metric reflects the corresponding validation rate for your CPC activity.
For more information, please contact our support team at support@sovrn.com.
My link landed on an incorrect destination, why did this happen and what should I do?
With over seven years of experience managing CPC networks, Sovrn has developed a robust capability to mitigate bad actors and ensure reliable, premium demand for your traffic. As our demand stack continually expands to offer our publishers more revenue opportunities in a rapidly evolving industry, occasional incidents may occur. Rest assured, our dedicated quality team is swift in investigating and resolving any issues on your behalf.
In the rare event of encountering misdirected links, such as error pages, dead links, or any unusual occurrences, please copy and paste the full redirect path of the exact URL and report it to Sovrn’s quality team. This will enable us to accurately troubleshoot the specific URL in question.