Buying Ads On A CPD Basis
When should I be buying ads on a CPD basis?
The simple answer is: when you being associated with a site will help you out.
CPD campaigns are generally good for branding and not performance, and they usually come at a comparatively high price so buying in this way only makes sense if you like a site a lot. Having your brand on the site should make the site’s users think more of you.
If associating your brand with a website will indeed help you out, then you can really break into their user’s consciousness by having your ads appear on a site/page all the time.
Just make sure your ads look great and the site/page is appropriate!
How do I manage a CPD deal?
CPD deals are extremely simple – provide ads to a site and they run them for a certain period. So instead of the performance of the ads, the important thing to manage is making sure you get all you can out of the campaign.
This means creating high-quality ads and getting them to the site early so they can troubleshoot and make sure they can implement them without problems.
While simply running all the ads on a page can be good, really for a sponsorship deal you want to own the page for that period. So a reskin or some sort of co-branding is the gold standard of a CPD deal. Not all sites can accommodate this, so be sure of what you can get before you get started.
Note: There is often a strong temptation with these sorts of deals to switch out the ads you are running often. While it may be a good idea to do this a couple of times, the more times you do it the more likely something will go wrong.
Considering you are trying to improve your brand’s image, having a broken sponsorship will really detract from that.
CPD Formula
The CPD equation is:
Click to enlargeCPD = Ad Spend ÷ Days
What CPD price should I pay?
There really is no guideline on this as the value of this activity is qualitative, not quantitative.
If you are dealing with a small site, you can probably get a great deal on some simple ad placements. In this case, it would make some sense to bring it back to an ROI comparison, but overall you are aiming at branding and not performance marketing so it is unfair to move the goalposts like this.
If you have an ad agency that you trust, then go with what they recommend. If not, go with your gut (and your budget restrictions).
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